DENVER – They saw more than 1,500 photographs. They heard more than 250 witnesses. They listened to 10 psychiatrists. They handled three guns.
Jurors in the Aurora theater shooting case will hear closing arguments and instructions from the judge this week. Then they’ll retreat into an oversized jury room – the only one in the courthouse that can hold all the evidence – to decide what of all this matters as they determine whether James Holmes was legally insane when he killed 12 people at a crowded midnight movie premiere.
Jurors have been deluged with information during nearly three months of testimony, and it’s impossible to know how all of it will play into their deliberations.
The only question they must answer is whether Holmes met Colorado’s threshold for an insanity verdict, by suffering from mental illness so severe that it rendered him unable to tell right from wrong at the time of the shootings.
Colorado law puts the burden of proof in these cases on the state: Prosecutors must show, beyond a reasonable doubt, despite Holmes’ mental disorder, he was capable of appreciating the wrongfulness of the shootings, which also wounded 58 people and left 12 others injured in the chaos that ensued.
The hideous details of the attack, the heartbreaking survival stories, the signs of mental illness that Holmes showed well before the events of July 20, 2012 – they shouldn’t matter. In legal terms, all the jury should focus on is whether the state has met its burden. But extraneous details that prosecutors and defense attorneys pile onto jurors often can make or break a case.
“This was a terrible tragedy in which great harm was caused for large numbers of people. It’s virtually impossible to divorce that question of insanity from its context,” said Valerie Hans, a Cornell Law School professor who has studied juries and the insanity plea. “I really feel for jurors who have to listen to wrenching testimony and steel themselves and look at the law and see which legal option really is the best match.”
If they agree Holmes is insane, he would be committed indefinitely to a state mental hospital. If they convict him, he faces life in prison, or execution.
A copy of Colorado’s insanity statute will guide them in the jury room as they consider Holmes’ mental state that night, analyzing his medical records, family history, police reports and journal. Four of the psychiatrists who testified were asked to test his sanity. Two declared him sane, and two others declared him insane.
Colorado allows jurors to question witnesses during trial, and they often did. A defense psychiatrist fielded more than 50 questions from jurors last week, about delusions, schizophrenia, mental illness and her methods for determining someone’s sanity. Merely having a mental illness, or suffering from delusional thinking, does not mean someone is insane, she said.
