CENTENNIAL, Colorado // Launching a case that legal analysts expect to be dominated by arguments over the defendant’s sanity, Colorado prosecutors filed formal charges yesterday against James Eagan Holmes, the 24-year-old accused of killing 12 people and wounding 58 others at a cinema in Aurora.
Holmes was charged with 140 counts of murder or attempted murder, including 12 of first-degree murder for each fatality. The breakdown of the charges was not immediately clear. He was also charged with one count of possession of explosives.
Holmes appeared just as dazed as he did in his first court appearance last week, but at one point exchanged a few words with one of his attorneys in the packed courtroom. Unlike his first court appearance July 23, yesterday’s hearing was not televised. At the request of the defence, District Chief Judge William Sylvester barred video and still cameras from the hearing, saying expanded coverage could interfere with the accused’s right to a fair trial.
Lawyers are expected to argue over a defence motion to find out who leaked information to the media about a package the former neuroscience graduate student allegedly sent to his psychiatrist at the University of Colorado Denver.
Authorities seized the parcel on July 23, three days after the shooting, after finding it in the mailroom of the medical campus where Holmes studied.
Several media outlets reported that it contained a notebook with descriptions of an attack, but the Arapahoe County District Attorney, Carol Chambers, said in court papers that the parcel had not been opened by the time the “inaccurate” news reports appeared.
Investigators said Holmes began stockpiling gear for his assault four months ago and bought his weapons in May and June, well before the shooting spree just after midnight during a showing of the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises.
He was arrested by police outside the cinema.
Analysts say this means that there will likely be only one main point of legal dispute between prosecutors and the defence.
“I don’t think it’s too hard to predict the path of this proceeding,” said Craig Silverman, a former chief deputy district attorney in Denver. “This is not a whodunit. ... The only possible defence is insanity.”
Under Colorado law, defendants are not legally liable for their acts if their minds are so “diseased” that they cannot distinguish between right and wrong.
But the law warns that “care should be taken not to confuse such mental disease or defect with moral obliquity, mental depravity, or passion growing out of anger, revenge, hatred, or other motives, and kindred evil conditions”.
Experts say there are two levels of insanity defences.
Holmes’s public defenders could argue that he is not mentally competent to stand trial, which is the argument by lawyers for Jared Loughner, who is accused of killing six people in 2011 in Tucson, Arizona, and wounding several others.
Mr Loughner, who has pleaded not guilty to 49 charges, has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and is undergoing treatment at a Missouri prison facility in a bid to make him mentally fit to stand trial.
If Holmes’s lawyers cannot convince the court that he is mentally incompetent, and he is convicted, they can try to stave off a possible death penalty by arguing he is mentally ill. Prosecutors will decide whether to seek the death penalty in the coming weeks.
Holmes was not expected to enter pleas yesterday. He could verbally enter a plea to the anticipated dozen first-degree murder charges, or his lawyers could enter it for him.
Prosecutors may file multiple counts of attempted first-degree murder and other charges against Holmes, who booby-trapped his apartment with the intent to kill any officers going there on the night of the shooting, Aurora police said.
Sam Kamin, a law professor at the University of Denver, said there was “pronounced” evidence that the attack was premeditated, which would make an insanity defence difficult. “But the things we don’t know are what this case is going to hinge on, and that’s his mental state,” he said.
Friends in southern California, where Holmes grew up, have described him as smart, sometimes awkward and fascinated by science.
He went to Colorado’s competitive neuroscience doctoral programme in June 2011. A year later, he dropped out shortly after taking his year-end exam.