CENTENNIAL, Colo. -- A prosecutor said Monday that two psychiatric exams found Colorado theater gunman James Holmes to be sane as he meticulously plotted a mass murder, considering a bomb or biological warfare before settling on a shooting so he could inflict more "collateral damage."
"Meticulous" was how Holmes twice described his plans during the exams, District Attorney George Brauchler said at the start of a trial to determine whether Holmes will be executed, spend his life in prison or be committed to an institution as criminally insane.
"I shot at people trying to get away. I shot at people trying to leave the theater ... to make sure others wouldn't follow," Holmes later told a psychiatrist, the prosecutor said.
Holmes' public defender, Daniel King, countered that 20 doctors who examined him in custody as well as the therapist who saw him before the shootings all agree he suffers from schizophrenia, a psychotic brain disease that skewed his thoughts and compelled him to kill.
"He was a good kid" who had no record of ever harming anyone before he had a psychotic delusion that compelled him to murder 12 people and wound 70 at a midnight Batman movie premiere nearly three years ago, King said.
The former neuroscience student has pleaded innocent by reason of insanity.
"Mental illness can sure sound like an excuse, but in this case, it's not," King said. "There will be no doubt in your minds that by the end of this trial, Mr. Holmes is severely mentally ill."
Under Colorado law, Brauchler must prove Holmes was sane.
"Four hundred people came into a boxlike theater to be entertained, and one person came to slaughter them," the prosecutor said.
Many more people would have died, but a magazine on Holmes' AR-15 semi-automatic rifle jammed, leaving bullets unfired, Brauchler said.
Jurors must eventually decide whether Holmes was unable to know right from wrong because of a mental illness or defect when he slipped into the theater, unleashed tear gas and tried to empty his weapons on the crowd.
Holmes is charged with a total of 166 counts of first-degree murder, attempted murder and an explosives offense in the mayhem in suburban Denver on July 20, 2012.
That Holmes was the lone gunman has never been in doubt. He was arrested at the scene with an arsenal of weapons on his body and in his car.
His victims included two active-duty servicemen, a single mom, a man celebrating his 27th birthday, and an aspiring broadcaster who had survived a mall shooting in Toronto.
Prosecutors allege that Holmes planned the violence for months. "He tried to murder a theater full of people to make himself feel better and because he thought it would increase his self-worth," Brauchler said.
But King said "there is nothing inconsistent between mental illness and planning. The question is what are they planning for? Is it a logical, rational objective? Or is it a delusional objective that makes no sense?
"By the time Mr. Holmes stepped into that theater, his perception of reality was so skewed, was so malformed, that he no longer lived in the world that we live in," King said.
A Section on 04/28/2015