CENTENNIAL, Colo. — Prosecutors on Monday filed 142 charges - including 24 for first-degree murder - against James Holmes, the former graduate student who is accused of killing 12 people and injuring 58 during a shooting at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater early July 20.
In addition to two counts of first-degree murder for each of the12 victims, Holmes was charged with 116 counts of attempted murder, two each for the 58 injured.
For the murder charges, one count was murder with deliberation, the other murder with extreme indifference. Both counts carry a maximum death penalty upon conviction; the minimum is life without parole.
A conviction under extreme indifference means that any life sentences would have to be served consecutively, not concurrently, said Craig Silverman, a former chief deputy district attorney in Denver.
In addition, Holmes was charged with one count of possession of explosives and one count of a crime of violence. Authorities said he booby-trapped his apartment with the intent to kill any officers responding there the night of the attack.
The charging document also lists, for the first time, the names of all the victims of the attack.
Holmes, 24, has been in police custody for 10 days, but prosecutors had delayed charging him as investigators and police continued their probe. Police have described the shooting rampage, which occurred during a midnight showing of the new Batman film The Dark Knight Rises, as a methodical attack that took months of planning, during which Holmes purchased weapons and stockpiled other materials.
At Monday’s hearing, Colorado District Judge William Blair Sylvester also heard several motions, including those from Holmes’ attorneys, who want access to documents related to the investigation. Prosecutors said they have thousands of pages of police reports and long lists of witnesses.
Tamara Brady, a public defender representing Holmes, said she and others have yet to see much of that information. “We are operating simply on things we have heard and things we assume,” she said. Prosecutors agreed to get Holmes’ attorneys much of their documentation in the next few days.
Sylvester also tentatively set aside a week in November for a preliminary hearing.
In the 45 minutes that Holmes was in the courtroom, he appeared dazed. A light-colored beard had grown on his cheeks since he last appeared in court.
Holmes appeared emotionless, and his eyes seemed heavy. He mostly sat back in his chair, sometimes swaying side to side during the proceedings. His gaze often drifted to one of the eight officers stationed in the courtroom, the attorneys or judge. At one point, he stared at the ceiling. At another, he closed his eyes as if dozing off. He spoke only once, when Sylvester asked him whether he understood that his attorneys had waived a time restriction for his preliminary hearing.
“Yes,” Holmes said.
Sylvester set Aug. 16 to hear a motion to determine whether information contained in a package that Holmes purportedly sent to a University of Colorado at Denver psychiatrist, Lynne Fenton, before the shooting is privileged. News reports described the notebook as a journal of sorts that included crude drawings of a mass gun attack. It is in dispute when the package arrived at the university, but it was seized by police July 23. Arapahoe County District Attorney Carol Chambers said in court papers that the parcel was found unopened.
“We absolutely, positively need to ensure and maintain the integrity of the process,” Sylvester said.
Holmes’ attorneys say that Holmes was Fenton’s patient while he was a student in the university’s doctoral program in neuroscience and that the leaking of information about the package violated his privacy and right to due process and a fair trial. Holmes is being represented by Brady and public defender Daniel King, and his mental health is expected to be at the heart of the case.
“I don’t think it’s too hard to predict the path of this proceeding,” Silverman said. “This is not a whodunit. ... The only possible defense 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. However, 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 said there are two levels of insanity defenses.
Holmes’ public defenders could argue 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, Ariz., and wounding several others, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. 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’ attorneys 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.
Hours before the hearing was set to begin, reporters set up camp in the parking lot of the district courthouse, about 15 miles south of the Century 16 movie theater where the massacre occurred. At Holmes’ last hearing, cameras were allowed in the courtroom, and commentators later picked apart the suspect’s behavior and facial expressions.
For Monday’s hearing, Sylvester barred cameras and all electronic equipment from the courtroom.
Sylvester also has imposed a gag order on the attorneys and law enforcement agencies involved in the case, sealed court records and barred the university from releasing relevant public records to the media. The Washington Post and other news organizations are contesting the judge’s decision to seal the records filed by the prosecution and defense.
An attorney representing a group of media organizations - “too large to name” - spoke during Monday’s hearing. Sylvester set a hearing for Aug. 9 on the issue of unsealing the court records.
Dozens of witnesses and relatives of victims, along with a few victims themselves, attended the hearing, sitting in either the courtroom, where they could stare down Holmes, or a nearby room, where they could watch the proceedings on a television screen. Afterward, prosecutors and victim advocates met with the group to explain what was to come and answer questions, according to several people who were there. They also tried to manage expectations and warned the group that there was a long process ahead.
“We want them to charge as much as they can. ... But if you want him convicted and put away, you don’t want to charge 800,000 things,” said a 25-year-old man who was at the theater that night but escaped unharmed. He asked that his name not be used to protect himself from the wave of media inquiries that have deluged others. “I wasn’t personally injured, but there’s so much mental trauma that has to be dealt with,” he said.
Some of the people in the court wore Batman T-shirts. Several people clasped their hands and bowed their heads as if in prayer before the hearing.
Those at the courthouse Monday included an apparent victim who was transported from the courthouse in a wheelchair, her left arm and left leg bandaged. The mother of Rebecca Wingo, a 32-year-old mother of two who was killed, was there. There also were several relatives of Ashley Moser, 25, who was seriously injured in the shooting and whose daughter, 6-year-old Veronica Moser-Sullivan, was killed.
Many of those who attended the hearing declined to speak with the media stationed outside the courthouse, but a few stopped to share why they wanted to be at the proceedings.
“It was very important to come today to see him for what he was,” said Mary Ellen Hansen, Moser’s aunt and a retired principal. Unlike the previous hearing, which Hansen said she also watched, Holmes seemed more alert and aware of what was happening Monday, she said. “I felt anger and I felt resentment that anyone could take away someone’s life for just going to the movies. ... He had a persona of evilness to him.”
Ashley Moser, who was pregnant, has suffered a miscarriage since the shooting, according to her relatives, and she is paralyzed from the waist down. In addition to losing her daughter and an unborn child, Moser also has lost her dream of becoming a nurse, her aunt said.
Hansen said at one point, Holmes looked out at the audience and she tried, unsuccessfully, to make eye contact with him. “I wanted to have eye contact with him, I really did. To just look at him in the eye,” she said.
Don Lader, 25, was at the courthouse wearing a black Dark Knight Rises T-shirt. Although he and his wife escaped the theater that night, Lader said they have been back to see the movie twice “to prove that we could sit down and watch and enjoy.” Lader said he has been obsessively researching what happened and wanted to see Holmes in the courtroom.
“It is going to be a long process,” said Lader, a former Marine who plans to start law school in California in January. “There are going to be a lot of triggers. I hope that those personally involved take care of themselves. I don’t want to see this individual claim another life.”Information for this article was contributed by Jenna Johnson of The Washington Post; and by Nicholas Riccardi and P. Solomon Banda of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/31/2012