Sentencing Holmes on Wednesday (26Aug15), Judge Carlos Samour said, “The defendant will never be a free man again, ever”.
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“It is nearly impossible to comprehend how a human being is capable of such acts”, Judge Samour. said. Samour acknowledged that some families and survivors of the July 20, 2012 shootings are unhappy that Holmes did not get the death penalty, but noted the gunman will die in the custody of the Department of Corrections.
However, Judge Samour on Wednesday said that whatever illness Holmes may have been suffering from, there were overwhelming “moral obliquity, mental depravity, … anger, hatred, revenge, or similar evil conditions” also been behind his actions.
“That doesn’t sound a like a four-star hotel to me”, Samour said. “I believe in the system”. Ultimately, Holmes was given 12 consecutive life sentences, one for each person he killed in the shooting, as well as 3,318 additional years for the other counts stemming from the attack.
That’s the maximum sentence he faced after jurors convicted him of murder, but could not agree on the death penalty.
Samour will formally hand down the life sentences for 24 murder convictions – two for each victim – after a three-day hearing that began Monday.
Wearing a helmet, gas mask and ballistic gear, Holmes tossed tear gas into Theater 9 of the Century 16 megaplex in Aurora during the first minutes of the midnight show of “The Dark Knight Rises“. “We can not feel the depths of your pain”, she said.
“We are unable to pick up the phone and say ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ We are unable to write them…”
“We are very sorry this tragedy happened and sorry everyone has suffered so much”, she testified.
They spoke of holidays, weddings and graduations that won’t be celebrated, and about depression, night terrors and survivor’s guilt. “Perhaps his parents. Perhaps his family … and that would have been the end of it”, Samour continued. They said Holmes was obsessed with the idea of mass killing since childhood, and he pursued neuroscience in an effort to find out what was wrong with his brain.
However, prosecutors used Holmes’ elaborate planning and the fact he didn’t tell anyone of his urges to create a winning case.
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Public defender Dan King announced in his final statement on Tuesday that the defense would not be seeking an appeal of the verdict in this case.
