He was told he would be cross-examined if he chose to testify and that the jury could ask questions, with the judge’s approval. The judge says if Holmes wants to talk about seeing shadows, he should take the stand.
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A third, Dr Jonathan Woodcock, was enlisted by Holmes’ defense team and testified in late June that Holmes was insane.
Attorneys for Colorado theater shooter James Holmes are expected to wrap up their case Friday, and jurors could start deliberating next week on the central question in the trial: Whether Holmes was legally sane…
Closing statements are expected next week.
“The severe defect in his brain, in his mind, rendered him not capable of distinguishing right from wrong by societal standards”, she said Wednesday.
Gur said she repeatedly asked Holmes why he did not kill himself instead of others, and he replied that he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
Prosecutors continued a blistering attack Wednesday on the accuracy and thoroughness of a second defense expert who concluded James Holmes was so mentally ill he couldn’t tell right from wrong when he carried out a deadly attack at a Colorado movie theater.
He had experienced fleeting thoughts about homicide previously, but he always found refuge in computer games and homework, Gur said.
“I told him, ‘But you could kill others.’ And he was a little bit shaken”.
But prosecutors hammered at Gur’s report, accusing her over more than two days of cross-examination of everything from bad grammar to being errant by not asking certain follow-up questions or recording her interviews.
But she acknowledged to Brauchler that she wrote her report about her conclusions after the first 13 hours of interviews.
“My report does not include every word that I exchanged with Mr. Holmes”, the psychiatrist responded.
Gur said Holmes probably had his first psychotic break about six months before the shooting.
But she later gave conflicting testimony about whether Holmes had ever told her that he killed to put people out of their misery. “The presentation was most consistent with… schizophrenia”, Gur said.
Testifying for the defense, Raquel Gur, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Schizophrenia Research Center, told jurors on Tuesday she believes Holmes suffers from schizophrenia and was not in control of his actions.
The whole case depends on how reliable jurors find the more than 10 psychiatrists and psychologists who testified at some point about Holmes’ mental state before and after the shootings.
The prosecution says Holmes is a methodical mass murderer who hid his preparations for the rampage from psychiatrists at the University of Colorado, and that he did it because he had lost his girlfriend, career, and goal in life.
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