Yesterday, a Colorado Judge accepted Aurora shooting suspect James Holmes’s defense of not guilty by reason of insanity:
CENTENNIAL, Colo. — A judge accepted James Holmes’ long-awaited plea of not guilty by reason of insanity Tuesday and ordered him to undergo a mental evaluation — an examination that could be a decisive factor in whether the Colorado theater shooting suspect is convicted and sentenced to die.
The judge also granted prosecutors access to a hotly contested notebook that Holmes sent to a psychiatrist shortly before the July 20 rampage, which left 12 people dead and 70 injured in a bloody, bullet-riddled movie theater in suburban Denver.
Taken together, the three developments marked a major step forward in the 10-month-old case, which at times has inched along through thickets of legal arguments or veered off on tangents.
Holmes faces more than 160 counts of murder and attempted murder, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
He will now be examined by the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo, but it’s not certain when the evaluation will begin or how long it will take. Hospital officials have said that before they meet with Holmes, they want to review evidence in the case, which prosecutors said totals nearly 40,000 pages.
Judge Carlos Samour Jr. set a tentative date of Aug. 2 for the exam to be complete but said he would push that back if hospital officials request more time. Samour indicated he still hopes to begin Holmes’ trial in February.
This isn’t entirely surprising. Although accepting the plea was within the Judge’s discretion given that Holmes had already pled not guilty without a mental health defense, rejecting the plea change would have clearly been an automatic grounds for appeal. How this impacts the case is unclear. As I’ve noted before, Colorado law on the insanity defense is, as far as I know, unique in the United States in that it places the initial burden of establishing the Defendant’s mental state at the time of the offense on the prosecution rather than the defense. What that means for how a trial might proceed is unclear since we know nothing about how Holmes might be evaluated by mental health professionals. Nonetheless, this is a case that will raise some interesting questions regarding how we treat mental health in this country.
