Theater shooter Holmes gets 12 life sentences, plus 3,318 years
Judge: My Intention is James Holmes Spends 'the Rest of His Life in Prison'
August 26, 2015
CENTENNIAL, Colo. — James Holmes was an angry quitter who gave up on life and turned his hatred into murder and mayhem against innocent victims in a Colorado movie theater, a judge said Wednesday before formally sentencing him to life in prison.
District Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. announced the sentence at a hearing Wednesday, ending a grueling, emotional trial that had stretched out for much of this year. As Samour had told the jurors before they deliberated on Holmes’s punishment, he was required to sentence the gunman to life in prison without parole if the jurors could not reach a unanimous decision.
“The defendant does not deserve any sympathy,” Samour said.
After announcing that Holmes was sentenced to life in prison, Samour continued to add years to the total. Ultimately, Holmes was given 12 consecutive life sentences, one for each person he killed in the shooting, as well as 3,318 additional years for the other counts stemming from the attack.
“The intention of my sentences is that he spend every single day of the rest of his life in prison, and that he be imprisoned without the possibility of parole,” Samour said from the bench, while Holmes stood before him. “If there was ever a case that warranted the maximum sentences, this is the case.”
When he was finished reading out the sentences, Samour asked that the sheriff “get the defendant out of my courtroom, please,” prompting cheers and applause from the room as Holmes was taken away.
Holmes was spared the death penalty after one juror said they would not sentence him to death, according to George Brauchler, the prosecutor, and one of the other jurors in the case.
The gunman had not denied that he carried out one of the worst mass shootings in American history. His attorneys had said in a filing that he “was in the throes of a psychotic episode when he committed the acts that resulted in the tragic loss of life and injuries sustained by moviegoers on July 20, 2012.”
Moviegoers were watching a midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises” in Aurora, a suburb of Denver, when a lone gunman began firing into the crowd. Holmes calmly and silently marched through the theater, witnesses said, firing at adults and children alike.
Prosecutors had argued that Holmes meticulously planned the crime and was focused on carrying out a mass murder, while attorneys from the Colorado State Public Defender said he was removed from reality and had lost his mind to psychosis.
Death sentences are rare in Colorado. The state has sentenced 22 people to death between 1973 and 2013, according to federal figures.
Holmes will now be kept in custody for the remainder of his natural life, which avoids the lengthy process of appeals that would accompany a death sentence. Death row inmates nationwide have spent an average of 14 yearsunder their sentences, and the Colorado Department of Corrections notes that due to appeals, inmates will spend at least a decade on death row.
To the end, Holmes' state-appointed attorneys blamed the massacre on his schizophrenia and psychotic delusions. They said Holmes was obsessed with the idea of mass killing since childhood, and he pursued neuroscience in an effort to find out what was wrong with his brain.Prosecutors pointed both to Holmes' elaborate planning for the attack and his refusal to divulge to anyone — family, friends, psychiatrists — that he was thinking, and planning, murder.
Holmes stockpiled guns and ammunition and mapped out the Aurora theater complex to determine which auditorium would allow for the most casualties. He even calculated police response times.
Defense attorney Daniel King said Tuesday Holmes will not appeal his conviction, sparing victims the possibility of another emotionally wrenching trial.
Holmes' sentencing hearing was largely symbolic but gave scores of victims an unprecedented chance to vent their feelings to the judge. They told him of flashbacks and nightmares, of relentless survivor's guilt and enduring physical pain.
Holmes’s parents had pleaded for their son’s life before the trial began, saying that while people viewed their son as a monster, he was instead a man gripped by mental illness.