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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Prosecutors Demand Death|for Batman Murderer

DENVER (CN) - Prosecutors demanded the death penalty for the Batman movie mass murderer, as the sentencing phase of James Holmes' trial began Wednesday.

The jury one week ago convicted Holmes of all 165 counts of murder and possession of explosives, near three years after he shot to death 12 people and wounded 70 in a Century 16 theater in Aurora.

Prosecutor Richard Orman spent the afternoon in Arapahoe County Court telling the nine-woman, three-man jury why Holmes fit all five aggravating factors for the death penalty under Colorado law: killing a child younger than 12 intentionally, acting without mercy, waiting and trapping his victims, creating a "grave risk of death," and killing more than two people.

Orman went into great detail to illustrate the parallels between the aggravating factors and Holmes' behavior.

"At the moment of their deaths, the victims would not only be in fear for their own lives, but in fear for the lives of their friends and family and loved ones. They died surrounded by screaming and by pain and by anguish. "Dying like that is unnecessarily torturous. It is pitiless," Orman said.

Orman drew attention to the youngest of Holmes' victims, 6-year-old Veronica Moser-Sullivan, as he showed large photos of all the victims who died by Holmes' hand on July 20, 2012.

"She was shot four times by the defendant," Orman said. "When you shoot someone four times, you do it with intent, and you have the conscious objective to kill that girl."

Holmes' defense team, expected to present their sentencing arguments Thursday morning, spent the three months of trial claiming that Holmes' schizoaffective disorder made it impossible to hold Holmes accountable for the massacre. Their plea of insanity was struck down in a day and a half of juror deliberation.

Before the jurors begin deliberating Holmes' sentence, Judge Carlos Samour Jr. told them that if they could not unanimously sentence Holmes to death, he will spend his life in prison.

He explained the severity of the death penalty to the jurors as they prepared to leave the courtroom, telling them that "the law never requires the death sentence."

The sentencing phase is expected to take a month.

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