James Holmes/Aurora

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James Holmes Update: Accused Colorado movie theater shooter requests insanity plea - Crimesider - CBS News

<"It's literally a life-and-death situation with the government seeking to execute him and the government, the same government, evaluating him with regard to whether he was sane or insane at the time he was in that movie theater," said attorney Dan Recht, a past president of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar.


Among the risks for prosecutors: They must convince jurors beyond a reasonable doubt that Holmes was sane. If they don't, state law requires the jury to find him not guilty by reason of insanity.
"That's a significant burden on the prosecution," Recht said.
If acquitted, Holmes would be committed to the state mental hospital indefinitely.

The mental evaluation could take weeks or months. Evaluators will interview Holmes, his friends and family, and if Holmes permits it, they'll also speak with mental health professionals who treated him in the past, said Dr. Howard Zonana, a professor of psychiatry and adjunct professor of law at Yale University.

Evaluators may give Holmes standardized personality tests and compare his results to those of people with documented mental illness. They will also look for any physical brain problems.>

The defense attorneys say they now have a diagnosis but didn't specify what it was.

I don't think I could serve on this jury either. Thanks to cable news I well remember that event and was convinced that this individual clearly was not of sound mind.

I would think hours would have to be spent covering premeditation. Yes, I believe that a person with some severe disorder could meticulously plan and then execute such a plan.

 

[waltky]

Now it comes out - The warning was there but ignored...

AP Exclusive: Records show university's response to Holmes
2 Sept.`15 — More than a month before James Holmes' rampage on a Colorado movie theater, the head of his neuroscience graduate program called a campus police officer with alarming information: Holmes had told his psychiatrist that he wanted to kill people to make up for his failure in science.

The call, never previously disclosed, came just after the psychiatrist expressed similar concerns to the same University of Colorado police officer in June 2012, when Holmes abruptly ended his academic career after repeatedly sharing his homicidal urges. But newly released documents show the officer did little other than check to see whether Holmes had a criminal record and deactivate his campus access cards. And his psychiatrist declined to detain Holmes, who had revealed no specific targets or threats, because she thought it would only "inflame him."

The documents obtained by The Associated Press provide new details about the best chance authorities had to stop Holmes before the July 2012 theater massacre. They also show how hard it can be to predict who will turn violent, even when they've displayed warning signs, experts say. "There's no reliable way we can identify those few who will pick up a gun and start shooting people from the vast number who might seem odd or unusual or even scary," said James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminologist who has studied and written about mass killings. "You can't predict it. Did they do everything they could have? That's another question."

A judge last week sentenced Holmes to life in prison without parole for murdering 12 people and trying to kill 70 more after jurors couldn't agree that he deserved the death penalty. The documents, released by the University of Colorado and prosecutors in response to open-records requests by the AP, provide the fullest look yet at how university officials handled concerns about Holmes, who dropped out of the prestigious program a month before the attack. A longstanding gag order lifted at the end of Holmes' trial had prohibited officials from releasing the documents or speaking publicly about the case.

The jury that convicted Holmes never heard about the professor's warning to police nor what the officer did in response because prosecutors and Holmes' defense attorneys did not ask about it during testimony in the months-long trial. Experts say that information was not relevant to the heart of the criminal case. A federal lawsuit filed by the widow of one of Holmes' victims accuses university officials and Holmes' psychiatrist, Dr. Lynne Fenton, of not doing enough to stop the shooting. With the trial over, the lawsuit can proceed. During the trial, Fenton testified that, without specific threats or targets, she lacked the evidence to have him placed on a 72-hour psychiatric hold.

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