A Dark Night in Aurora

by Dr. William H. Reid

  Mary Theresa Hoover, mother of murder victim A. J. Boik, told the jury that she had lost half her children, “half of what I was put on this earth to do.”

  Caren Teves, mother of deceased Alex Teves, spoke of “pain every single day” and her fear that someday she won’t remember what her son’s laugh sounded like.

  Sandy Phillips wore her dead daughter’s scarf to the witness stand. She always wears that scarf as a memorial. “I cry every day,” she said. She and her husband, now sixty-five and seventy-one years old, “don’t plan a future anymore.”

  The victims weren’t the only people in the courtroom who cried. During the phase three testimony, defense lawyer Brady objected to the prosecution’s calling two victim-witnesses to talk about the death of six-year-old Veronica Moser (rather than only her mother). Brady noted that many jurors had been crying—up to half of them, she said—and overwhelmed with emotion. The judge agreed that a couple of jurors had been weeping at times but said he was monitoring them and did not believe their emotion was excessive (and thus that fairness was in jeopardy). Samour had warned the jurors about emotional displays and admonished them to show self-restraint. The prosecution was allowed to call Veronica’s grandfather as well as her mother.

  After the prosecution called its last victim impact witness, Judge Samour once again reminded Holmes of both his right to testify on his own behalf and his right to make an allocution to the jury. The allocution would be a personal statement, without cross-examination, in which he could try to influence the jury or express whatever else he wished. Holmes declined. He had shown almost no emotion during the entire trial and spoken fewer than a dozen words to the Court.

  The next day, just before each side presented closing arguments for the last time, the judge gave the jury his final instructions.

  Samour’s instructions for the phase three deliberations varied from routine—the same admonishments as before, such as to stick to the evidence presented and avoid outside influences—to the gravity of what, he said, “may well be the most important and serious decisions you will ever be asked to make.” One instruction included the words, “The law never requires a death sentence.”

  Each juror’s sentencing decision, he said, for each individual charge of murder, must be reached beyond a reasonable doubt and in addition must “reflect a profoundly reasoned moral response to the defendant’s background, character, history, and crimes.” Mercy and sympathy, within the context of the evidence presented, could be considered. They heard the victim impact statements but were to base their decisions on the evidence, not emotion. They were not to compare the defendant to the victims. The death penalty had been authorized by the jury’s phase two finding; these last deliberations were to determine whether or not every juror believed execution was appropriate justice for Holmes. A unanimous death sentence for any of the counts would invoke the death penalty.

  That’s a very different way of thinking from that of the hundreds of thousands of television viewers, armchair quarterbacks, Internet trolls, and media commentators who had been calling for the death penalty every day for months. It’s easy when you’re not a juror, when you don’t have all of the evidence and all of the responsibility of those twelve people who make the decision for real.

  DA Brauchler took thirty minutes for his closing, beginning with a projected photo of the Century 16 entrance and the words, “Through this door is horror.” He showed photos of all the murder victims, each fading out to the sounds of screams and gunshots from the 911 recordings. Brauchler’s final statement was “For James Eagan Holmes, justice is death. Death.”

  As defense lawyer Brady rose to begin her final argument, many of the observing victims and family members left the courtroom. Their exit hadn’t been planned in advance; it just happened. At least one juror watched them leave.

  Brady took thirty minutes as well, pleading for Holmes’s life with quiet passion. The shootings were heartbreaking, she said, but they were caused by Holmes’s psychiatric disorder. “The death of a seriously mentally ill man is not justice. Please, no more death.”

  The bailiff escorted the jurors to the jury room to begin deliberations. They finished their task in less than twenty-four hours.

  The next day, Friday, August 7, 2015, the foreperson signaled the judge that the jury had reached a verdict. Before the jurors returned to the courtroom, the judge once again cautioned victims and other spectators about outbursts. The jury filed in and sat down.

  Samour read their verdicts, identical except for the victims’ names, for each first-degree murder charge:

  We the jury do not have a unanimous final verdict on this count and we the jury understand that as a result the Court will impose a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

  At the first indication that Holmes would not be put to death, his mother, Arlene, sobbed with relief and slumped into her husband Robert’s shoulder. He braced her gently. The judge continued to read. Some spectators, mostly victims and their families, left to release their feelings outside. Their cries could be heard through the courtroom doors.

  James Holmes would live because one juror refused to assess the ultimate penalty. Two others had serious doubts because of his mental illness, it was later learned, but the jury stopped deliberating because the additional juror decisions, in light of at least one vote against execution, would be moot.

  The jury was dismissed with thanks and high praise for their extraordinary work and endurance. Formal sentencing was scheduled for a final hearing that would begin on August 24.

  At the final sentencing hearing, Holmes was back in an orange jail jumpsuit and shackles. He would sit through two days of additional victim impact statements, made to the judge rather than addressed directly to him (Holmes), before the sentences were read. Over a hundred people, some in wheelchairs, some still grieving the deaths of loved ones, some living with the special trauma of being a first responder to the massacre, many having trouble getting their words out, and all articulate in their own ways, remembered for the Court that terrible night in 2012 and its lasting physical and emotional devastation. With no jury to address, they spoke to Judge Samour from a lectern in front of the bench.

  A few weren’t satisfied that Holmes wouldn’t be put to death. One in particular called the upcoming life sentences unjust. Judge Samour took exception to that and spent considerable time responding to her comments. Justice means giving the facts to a jury and accepting their decisions, he said. The jury did its job. “If it was a popularity contest, then you could never have justice.”

  Arlene Holmes, a deeply suffering victim in her own right, was the last to take the podium. She spoke for her family, saying that Holmes does feel remorse but can’t express it well because of his illness. She expressed her family’s deep sorrow for all the victims. “We cannot feel the depths of your pain. We can only listen to everything you have expressed, and we pray for you.”

  At last, on August 26, 2015, twenty-seven-year-old Holmes stood impassively beside Public Defender King to hear his fate, his wrists handcuffed to a chain around his waist. Some media reports said his lack of expression was caused by his medication, but that’s unlikely. He just wasn’t emotional. The gist of the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

  James Holmes was sentenced to twelve consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole and an additional total of 3,318 years in prison for 141 lesser included offenses. It was the longest sentence in US history.

  ____________

  When he had finished reading the sentences, Judge Samour looked at Holmes with a scorn uncharacteristic of the respect he had shown the defendant during the trial. He contrasted Holmes’s unfeeling carnage with the compassion of the juror who voted against the death penalty. “The defendant does not deserve any sympathy,” he said, never using Holmes’s name, “and for that reason the Court imposes the maximum sentence it can impose under the law.” Samour’s final words as he closed the proceedings were, “Sheriff,
get the defendant out of my courtroom, please.”

  The gallery erupted in applause, then cheers. One woman shouted, “Loser, loser, loser,” as deputies escorted Holmes from the courtroom. The door closed behind him for the last time, and Judge Samour, an arbiter of justice under the most trying of circumstances, stepped down from his bench.

  Epilogue:

  Denouement

  Following his sentencing, Holmes was quickly moved from the Arapahoe County Detention Facility to a Denver corrections intake center, then to the level-five (maximum security) Colorado State Penitentiary in Cañon City, Colorado. He remained isolated from other inmates.

  In October of 2015, after being at Cañon City for about five weeks, he was assaulted by another inmate in a series of events the penitentiary described as “inadvertent.” The prison incident report says that a guard was escorting Holmes from his case manager’s office when someone opened a nearby security gate that had another inmate behind it. That inmate recognized Holmes, decided to attack him, and darted through the now-closing sliding door to get to him. The guard couldn’t radio the gate control person or call for help because, he said, the battery in his radio was dead. The assailant got in a few blows—he said six or seven; the official report said about two—before he was subdued, and also struck the female case manager. Holmes was not seriously injured and was said not to have required medical attention.

  The assault was described as accidental or serendipitous by the correctional staff involved and by the Colorado Prisons Director, Steve Hager. Hager mentioned surveillance video of the incident in an interview with ABC News—jails and prisons routinely have video in all inmate areas and preserve recordings that document things like assaults—but when the network later tried to obtain it, there was none. No staff person was ever disciplined. According to Hager and ABC, the inmate-assailant received sixty days in segregation, loss of privileges for forty-five days, restrictive housing, and a transfer to the Colorado penitentiary in Sterling City.

  The assailant, whom I decline to name, also received substantial notoriety for himself, network news coverage, national airing of a letter with his “apology” to America for not sending Holmes to “Satan’s Lake of Fire,” and several small donations to his commissary account from fans in the “free world” (prison slang for outside the walls). The assailant’s mother started a GoFundMe account for him. He later told a news outlet, through his father, that the assault had been set up by the guards. Prison officials dismissed those allegations as the words of an offender trying to minimize his own behavior.

  In mid-December, Holmes was moved to the San Carlos Correctional Facility, also level five, located in Pueblo on the campus of the Colorado Mental Health Institute. San Carlos is designed to house and treat inmates with severe mental illness or developmental disability. Some stays are brief, others much longer, depending on when the inmate can safely be sent to an ordinary prison. One corrections representative denied that the move was related to Holmes’s psychiatric condition, saying that it was simply part of routine movement through the system for a new inmate.

  This is where things get murky and information supplied by the Colorado Department of Corrections becomes confusing (perhaps for valid reasons).

  The prison system soon stopped releasing information about Holmes’s whereabouts. Some media reports, often based on interviews with a Department of Corrections spokesperson, said that he was transferred to another prison in January 2016, perhaps in Colorado and perhaps not. Other sources, including those I spoke with when I tried to schedule a post-sentencing follow-up interview with Holmes, implied that he remained at San Carlos until March and then was transferred to an undisclosed location out of state. Later records indicate that he was moved to another state in January via interstate compact (an agreement between correctional systems to exchange inmates who, for any of a number of reasons, are difficult to keep in-state).

  One seemingly obvious reason for the move was safety for Holmes, other inmates, and staff. On the other hand, Bob Hood, former warden of the federal “supermax” facility in Florence, Colorado, referred to the transfer as “a dump job.” Hood told ABC News that prisons manage assault risk every day and can deal effectively with dangers to both inmates and staff. Holmes’s situation wasn’t all that unusual.

  George Brauchler agreed. Speaking in favor of victims’ right to know Holmes’s location, he noted that other notorious offenders—from Charles Manson, to the 9/11 perpetrators, to former US Army major Nidal Hasan, who killed thirteen and wounded over thirty at Fort Hood, Texas—have never been sent to undisclosed locations. One of Brauchler’s deputy district attorneys, Rich Orman, filed open-records requests for more information on the transfer.

  Some observers noted at the time that if Holmes is in an unknown location, he won’t get the “fan” support that came to him when he was in the Arapahoe County Detention Facility. They, and some victims, like the idea that his odd group of supporters can’t send him letters, pictures, or commissary donations if they don’t know where he is.

  Several months after the trial, and not knowing where he was being held, I contacted Holmes’s parents in an effort to interview him one more time. I tried not to intrude but asked if they might consult their family attorney about sharing his location with me, very confidentially, so that I could seek his permission, and the institution’s, for a final visit. Arlene Holmes was cordial but understandably cautious; after all, I was one of the psychiatrists who testified that he should be held responsible for murder. She was kind enough to talk it over with her husband, but they ultimately declined.

  We know now that Holmes was transferred out of state in January of 2016. The following June, the Colorado Department of Public Safety’s Victims Rights Act Subcommittee came to a deadlock in its debate about whether or not the correctional system’s refusal to divulge his location to victims was illegal. In September of 2017, prison authorities revealed that Holmes is an inmate at the United States Penitentiary, Allenwood, part of a high-security federal correctional complex in White Deer, Pennsylvania, about three hours northwest of Philadelphia.

  On December 4, 2015, Judge Samour held yet another hearing in the Holmes case, this one related to restitution for the substantial financial costs incurred by the victims, their families, and the Colorado Victim Compensation Fund as a result of Holmes’s crimes. The district attorney’s office had brought the action, which was largely symbolic.

  Holmes was ordered to pay, should he ever have the money, $851,000 to reimburse the state fund for current expenditures and $103,000 to the victims themselves. Interest on the amount will accrue, and it could increase with future eligible expenses.

  A portion of any money Holmes earns in prison could be attached (taken by the State of Colorado), as can his prison accounts. Holmes was sent donations totaling several hundred dollars during his trial and ended up with almost $5,000 in his jail account by the time he was sentenced.

  Five years to the day after the shootings, residents of Aurora held a candlelight vigil in memory of Holmes’s victims. At 12:18 a.m. on July 20, 2017, the names of the deceased were read as white balloons were released. A crowd of people then walked toward Aurora’s 7/20 Reflection Memorial Garden, where a procession of law enforcement officers arrived to loud applause and cheers of support.

  If the jurors’ decisions had been unanimous for the death penalty, Holmes would probably never be executed. The road from conviction to execution is long and circuitous. Most condemned inmates escape that fate in one way or another. In Colorado, then-Governor John Hickenlooper was an outspoken opponent of the death penalty and had vowed that no one would be executed on his watch. It’s a conservative, “red” state, albeit with large liberal populations in the cities, but it seems likely that Colorado will repeal the death penalty in the fairly near future.

  Afterword:

  The Search for Why

  Where’s the why?

  A lot of readers bought this book to learn why James H
olmes did what he did. So far, I haven’t told you. I hope you’ll keep reading, even though I may not answer all your questions. As much as we like to think that criminal investigations, trials, and psychiatrists and psychologists lead us to the “why” of mass killings and their perpetrators, they don’t.

  The first time I met District Attorney George Brauchler, over a year before the Holmes trial, he told me that he just wanted to know what caused the shootings: why did Holmes do it? If there was some underlying cause that means he’s not guilty by reason of insanity, Brauchler said, so be it; he just wanted the answer.

  I have great respect for Brauchler, and I like him, but I don’t think that’s what he was thinking at the time. I was being shmoozed, just as I was from time to time by the public defenders. Brauchler’s task was to prosecute a person who had been duly indicted on twenty-four counts of murder and scores of other felony charges. His objective was to put Holmes onto death row. Saving him was solely the province of the public defender, not the prosecutors.

  Trials are not about finding the truth. They’re not even about finding the reasons for things, beyond what lawyers and jurists call “rational motive” (money, revenge, self-defense, and the like).

  Think about that for a moment.

  Criminal trials are about coming to justice, often in very complicated circumstances. They’re two-dimensional resolutions of multidimensional situations. They reduce crime, accusations of crime, loss, pain, fear, vengeance, penance, compensation, restitution, correction, and sometimes mercy to yes-or-no questions, guilty or not guilty.

  In the United States, they do their job through an adversary system, to resolve things one way or another. Trials are rarely about the whole story, the why.