Families and friends of the victims sobbed in dismay, as the jury surprised the experts by giving the neuroscience graduate student life in prison instead of the death penalty as many predicted.
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Because the jurors could not agree, Holmes serves a mandatory life sentence with no possibility of parole. Holmes avoided a death sentence when jurors couldn’t come to a unanimous decision on his punishment.
It took jurors only about 12 hours of deliberations to decide the first part – they rejected his insanity defense and found him guilty of 165 felony counts.
This concludes the three-year legal process following the shooting.
“I’m as disappointed for them as they are today”, he said.
But the previously decisive nine women and three men did not agree on death for Holmes, whose lawyers blamed the attack on mental illness. Photo:Andy Cross/The Denver Post via AP Defense Attorney Tamara Brady, at left in stripped suit, leans into the defense table as Judge Carlos Samour Jr reads the jury’s sentencing verdict. Prosecutors refused a pre-trial plea deal that would have kept him behind bars for life, calling Holmes the personification of evil and saying that death was the only appropriate response.
Prosecutors argued the attack was clearly premeditated, with Holmes planning and amassing weapons for months, as well as elaborately booby-trapping his apartment to kill anyone who tried to enter.
“All of us, no matter the decision, just felt bad for the victims”, she said. In the video clip below, he answers reporters’ questions about the decision to seek the death penalty, the long trial and the life sentence.
Several family members of the victims left the court angrily upon hearing the verdict.
The judge granted the request over the objections of the defence, but told the jury they could only view the video once.
Attorneys for Holmes argued that he is mentally ill. Residents in the state of Colorado overwhelmingly favored the death penalty in this case with 63 percent of those polled in favor and 32 percent favoring prison. Others told of how they had to stumble over the bodies of loved ones in a frenzy to exit the tear gas filled theater, making it hard to flee.
District Attorney George Brauchler said in Holmes’s case that “justice is death”.
But the panel did watch more than 22 hours of Holmes speaking to a court-appointed psychiatrist in a videotaped sanity examination.
Sandy Phillips, whose daughter Jessica Ghawi was murdered by Holmes, commiserated outside the courtroom after the verdict with a wheelchair-bound survivor, Caleb Medley. Brauchler said in his closing arguments that for Holmes, “justice is death”.
Holmes remained mostly expressionless throughout the trial, occasionally turning to look when a photograph of himself appeared on a court television. University of Colorado Anschultz Medical Campus, enrolled in 2011 as a doctoral candidate in its neuroscience program.
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August. 6, 2015 – Jurors begin deliberating Holmes’ sentence.
