Death sentence call over Colorado massacre
Sadie Gurman
July 23, 2015, 1:07 pm
Prosecutors have told jurors James Holmes should be put to death over the Colorado cinema shootings.
James Holmes should be put to death for the Colorado cinema shootings because he deliberately and cruelly killed 12 people, including a six-year-old girl, prosecutors have told jurors.
The same jurors who convicted Holmes of murder and attempted murder last week - swiftly dismissing his claim that he was legally insane during the attack - must now decide whether to sentence him to death or life in prison without parole.
Prosecutor Rich Orman made the case for death, on Wednesday showing jurors photos of each person killed and reading each person's name.
When he came to the youngest, six-year-old Veronica Moser-Sullivan, he reminded jurors that she "had four gunshot wounds to her little body".
The defence offered no counter-argument, effectively conceding that prosecutors had met the first of several requirements for the death penalty: that at least one aggravating factor was present in the massacre.
Jurors will resume deliberations on Thursday.
Sentencing is expected to last a month, and could be even more heart-wrenching and polarising than the 11-week trial for his attack on July 20, 2012.
The defence will try to show that mitigating factors make it wrong to execute him.
His lawyers will cite defence experts who diagnosed Holmes with schizophrenia and other disorders, and could call his parents, neighbours, a college roommate and officials from charities where Holmes volunteered to testify.
"It is going to be intense," said Denver defence lawyer Iris Eytan, who represented Holmes initially, but is no longer involved in the case.
Holmes's lawyers "will call anybody who James Holmes has had interaction with that can say he has a serious mental illness", Eytan said.
Their work will be challenging because, by most accounts so far, Holmes had not had a difficult life, Eytan said.
He was raised by loving, middle-class parents in California, graduated with honours from university and was accepted into a prestigious doctoral neuroscience program.
