Two versions of the unstable mind of James Holmes were presented to a jury on Monday as lawyers revealed many more details about his conversion from a promising grad student to a gunman capable of opening fire on hundreds of unsuspecting moviegoers at a Batman premiere.
The lead prosecutor displayed an image of the theater door on a TV screen as he told of a sinister, but sane killer who methodically carried out the 2012 mass murder to make himself feel good and be remembered.
“Through this door is horror. Through this door are bullets, blood, brains and bodies. Through this door, one guy who thought as if he had lost his career, lost his love life, lost his purpose, came to execute a plan,” said District Attorney George Brauchler, standing before a scale model of the theater. “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 two previously secret court-ordered psychiatric examinations found Holmes to be sane.
Public Defender Daniel King countered that Holmes suffers from schizophrenia, a diagnosis confirmed by 20 doctors.
Jurors must decide whether Holmes was able to know right from wrong when he slipped into the theater, unleashed tear gas and killed 12 people and wounded 70. He is charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder, an explosives offense and committing an act of violence for the mayhem he caused on July 20, 2012.
Holmes has pleaded not guilty 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,” he said.
Holmes sat quietly, harnessed to the floor by a cable that ran through his pants leg as the lawyers described his emotional rise and fall.
Defense attorneys said mental illness ran through both sides of Holmes’ family, including an aunt with schizophrenic affective disorder.
Holmes attempted suicide at age 11, had “intrusive thoughts” in high school and his mental illness “revved up” in his 20s, his attorney Katherine Spengler said.
King and Spengler referred to the seemingly delusional rants in a journal Holmes mailed to his therapist just before the shootings as proof that he had lost his mind.
Brauchler pointed instead to e-mails Holmes sent his parents, where he seemed to communicate rationally and downplay his emotional decline.
All the while, Holmes was buying an arsenal of weapons, ammunition, tear gas, explosive chemicals, body armor and remote control detonators, and going to a remote shooting range to practice what he described to an ex-girlfriend as his “evil plan,” the prosecutor said.
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