[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----OHIO, MO., NEB., USA

[Rick Halperin]

July 15



OHIO:

Attorneys for Danny Lee Hill say special prosecutor should handle question of 
new trial


Attorneys for convicted murderer Danny Lee Hill say the Trumbull County 
Prosecutor's office should be replaced with a special prosecutor as Hill's 
attorneys ask a visiting judge to grant Hill a new trial.

Hill and Timothy Combs were convicted of the 1985 rape, torture and murder of 
Raymond Fife, 12, and Hill was sentenced to the death penalty. Combs was a 
juvenile when the crime occurred.

Hill, 49, remains on death row after a visiting Trumbull County judge denied 
his request to be ruled mentally retarded/intellectually disabled and therefore 
ineligible for execution. Combs, 47, is serving a life prison sentence.

A motion filed this year in common pleas court says the county prosecutor's 
office has a conflict of interest and cannot "review the request for a new 
trial with any objective lens" because the mother of the murder victim, Miriam 
Fife, worked for the prosecutor's office for 29 years as a victim-witness 
advocate, part of that time as a volunteer.

The prosecutor's office says the request for a special prosecutor is "nothing 
more than a poorly contrived side show." The office says the motion filed by 
Atty. Sarah Kostick of Tucson, Ariz., and Vicki Ruth Adams Werneke of the U.S. 
Public Defender's Office in Cleveland is "completely meritless and 
unsupported."

The Ohio Supreme Court appointed Visiting Judge Patricia A. Cosgrove of Summit 
County in April to preside over a request by Kostick and Werneke for Hill to 
get a new trial on the grounds that the National Academy of Sciences now says 
bite-mark evidence used in Hill's 1985 trial cannot be "validated 
scientifically."

A June 2015 reply to the Kostick-Werneke motion filed by the prosecutor's 
office says Fife started working as a paid victim-witness advocate in 1989, 3 
years after Hill was convicted of her son's murder.

Miriam Fife, now retired, has not contributed to the prosecutor's office's 
responses to various appeals by Hill over the years, the filing says.

"This court may rest assured that even if Mrs. Fife openly opposed this 
defendant's execution, this office would continue to defend the death sentence 
imposed because it will forever view the defendant as a violent sexual predator 
who is a danger to any law-abiding community," the response says.

Meanwhile, Kostick and Werneke filed a document in the case July 7 that says 
the prosecutor's office has another conflict in the case that it learned about 
in June: Atty. Jim Lewis, who represented Hill during his murder trial in 
common pleas court in 1985 and 1986, now works for the prosecutor's office.

Lewis was hired in January 2013 after his retirement from the county office of 
the Ohio Public Defender.

There has been no indication from Judge Cosgrove when she will rule on the 
request for new trial or the request to assign a special prosecutor.

(source: Youngstown Vindicator)






MISSOURI----new execution date

Execution date set for Missouri killer of 15-year-old Kansas City girl


The Missouri Supreme Court has set a date for the execution of Roderick Nunley, 
1 of 2 men responsible for the rape and murder of 15-year-old Ann Harrison in 
Kansas City 26 years ago. Nunley is scheduled to die by lethal injection 
September 1 at the prison in Bonne Terre.

Nunley's execution was set to be carried out in October, 2010, but was stayed 
at the 11th hour because he had been sentenced to death by a judge and not a 
jury. Nunley had pleaded guilty to his role in those crimes, hoping to avoid 
the death penalty.

His accomplice in Harrison's murder, Michael Taylor, was executed by lethal 
injection in February 2014.

Missouri has not scheduled an execution for August, making that the 1st month 
since November 2013 that an execution has not been scheduled. 16 executions 
have been carried out in that span, with some others have been called off.

Nunley and Taylor admitted to kidnapping Harrison the morning of March 22, 
1989, while she was waiting for her school bus. They took her to Taylor???s 
mother's house, forced her to crawl to the basement, and Taylor raped her. 
After that the 2 men forced her into their car, tied her up, and decided to 
kill her to prevent her from identifying them. Both men stabbed her before 
leaving her, dying, in the trunk of the car, parked in a nearby neighborhood.

His execution date was actually set last week but the release announcing it 
went to the media yesterday.

(source: missourinet.com)

****************************

Missouri carries out 1st execution since Supreme Court ruling on lethal 
injection


Authorities in Missouri executed an inmate on Tuesday night, making him the 1st 
person put to death by a state since the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on 
lethal injection last month.

Missouri and Texas have combined to carry out nearly all of the executions in 
the United States this year, and both states had lethal injections scheduled 
scheduled to take place over a 3-day span this week.

Zink, who was convicted of murdering Amanda Morton in 2001, had appealed to the 
Supreme Court, arguing that there were issues with the lawyers he was assigned 
before representing himself. In a series of orders on Tuesday, the court 
declined to stay his execution; the justices offered no explanations and there 
were no recorded dissents.

According to an outline of the case from the Missouri Supreme Court, which 
declined to get involved, Zink told investigators he killed Morton, saying he 
rear-ended her car, strangled her and stabbed her neck. The court also said she 
had "between 50 and 100 blunt force injuries" and described evidence that 
Morton was sexually assaulted.

In filings to the Supreme Court, Zink's attorneys also argued against the death 
penalty's constitutionality. They pointed to a recent dissent from 2 justices 
who questioned whether the death penalty was constitutional, going on to argue 
that capital punishment "has become a source of error and bias." The office of 
Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster dismissed this argument in its own 
filing.

Zink was executed by lethal injection at 7:33 p.m. local time in Bonne Terre, 
Mo., and pronounced dead at 7:41 pm., according to the Missouri Department of 
Corrections.

On Thursday, meanwhile, Texas plans to execute Clifton Williams, who was 
convicted of stabbing, beating and strangling a 93-year-old woman, according to 
state officials.

Zink's execution marks the country's 1st since the Supreme Court said last 
month that a drug used in troublesome lethal injections could be used going 
forward. However, this is a very different situation than we saw the last time 
the Supreme Court upheld a lethal injection policy, which took place nearly a 
decade ago amid a very different landscape for capital punishment in this 
country.

When the justices upheld a three-drug combination as constitutional in 2008, 
they also ended a de facto moratorium and allowed executions to resume (which 
they quickly did, as 6 states carried out executions in the weeks following 
that ruling). But there has been no such nationwide moratorium this time 
around, because so much changed between the 2008 decision on lethal injection 
and ruling to follow in 2015.

In 2008, the justices were discussing a 3-drug method used commonly across the 
country. There was more (relative) uniformity to the way executions were 
carried out. Lethal injection was the primary method of execution, and lethal 
injections usually involved 3 drugs: an anesthetic, a paralytic and a drug to 
stop the heart.

But the years that followed saw chaos slowly and then abruptly break out in 
this system. An ongoing shortage of the key lethal injection drugs prompted 
states to turn to different combinations and other methods, which eventually 
caused some to try new and untested combinations.

In 3 states - Ohio, Oklahoma and Arizona - executions involving the sedative 
midazolam appeared to go awry last year, with inmates gasping, choking and 
remaining conscious for longer than intended. The most high-profile of these 
involved the Oklahoma inmate Clayton Lockett, who kicked, bucked his body and 
grimaced during his execution in April 2014.

Widespread criticism followed, as did a state investigation that placed the 
blame on members of the execution team failing to properly place an intravenous 
needle that would deliver the drugs. More than 8 months later, Oklahoma resumed 
executions, putting Charles Warner - a man convicted of raping and murdering an 
infant - to death using a larger doze of midazolam.

4 Supreme Court justices said they would have stopped that execution, 
questioning whether midazolam could be used to properly sedate inmates during 
executions. The following week, the court decided to hear a challenge to 
Oklahoma's policy.

Yet while executions in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama were stayed - because the 
states all use or, in Alabama's case, intended to use midazolam - other states 
said they did not intend to delay their executions. A spokesman for the Texas 
Department of Criminal Justice noted that the state used a single dose of 
pentobarbital for executions, noting at the time that it had used the protocol 
dozens of times since 2012 "without complication."

So in the months since the Supreme Court said it would hear the lethal 
injection challenge, heard that challenge and issued a ruling on said 
challenge, Texas has executed 8 inmates and Missouri has executed 4.

In Georgia, authorities planned to execute an inmate during this window, but 
they have indefinitely delayed it. This execution was postponed once due to a 
winter storm, then called off a 2nd time days later due to issues with the 
lethal injection drugs. (Georgia later said the problem was that the drugs were 
being kept too cold.)

Meanwhile, officials in Florida, Alabama and Oklahoma have all called for their 
states to resume executions now that the Supreme Court has ruled. Unlike Texas 
and Missouri, these pushes were a direct response to the Supreme Court, which 
ruled 5 to 4 that the use of midazolam was constitutional.

Including Zink, 18 inmates have been put to death so far this year.

(source: Washington Post)

****************

Murderer: Execution is 'a much easier death'----Man kidnapped, raped, murdered 
woman in cemetery in 2001


Before his execution, convicted murderer David Zink had some unusual advice for 
other inmates facing the death sentence: appreciate the fate that awaits you.

"For those who remain on death row, understand that everyone is going to die," 
Zink said in his final statement ahead of his death by lethal injection in 
Missouri on Tuesday night.

Execution, he suggested, is preferable to spending the rest of your life in 
prison.

"Statistically speaking, we have a much easier death than most, so I encourage 
you to embrace it and celebrate our true liberation before society figures it 
out and condemns us to life without parole and we too will die a lingering 
death," his statement says.

Zink, 55, was executed for the abduction, sexual assault and murder of 
19-year-old Amanda Morton in 2001, a killing described by authorities as "an 
unspeakable act of violence."

He had confessed to tying Morton to a tree in a cemetery, breaking her neck and 
then slicing her spinal cord to ensure she wouldn't live, according to CNN 
affiliate KY3.

Failed bid to avoid execution

Despite his words about embracing the death penalty, Zink had mounted an 
unsuccessful legal challenge to avoid execution, arguing the death penalty was 
unconstitutional.

The Missouri governor also rejected a petition by Zink for clemency.

The murderer said in his final statement that he had sought to be spared 
execution for the benefit of his family and friends, who he said "had the 
unfortunate circumstance of developing emotions, which will now cause them pain 
and suffering."

He apologized to Morton's family, saying he hoped his execution "brings them 
the peace and satisfaction they seek."

A young life 'brutally taken away'

Zink was pronounced dead at 7:41 p.m. Tuesday after receiving the lethal 
injection at the Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne 
Terre, Missouri, authorities said.

"Fourteen years ago this week, a promising young life was suddenly and brutally 
taken away through an unspeakable act of violence," Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon 
said in a statement. "Tonight, as the sentence of David Zink has now been 
carried out, I ask the people of Missouri to remember Amanda Morton, and to 
keep her loved ones in their thoughts and prayers."

Zink abducted Morton after rear-ending her truck in the town of Strafford, 
according to KY3. He had been released from prison in Texas a few months 
earlier after serving 20 years of a 30-year sentence for raping and kidnapping 
a woman.

He buried Morton's body in the rural cemetery where he killed her.

(source: CNN)






NEBRASKA:

Gloor: Death penalty reinstatement won't lead to executions


State Sen. Mike Gloor told members of the Rotary Club Tuesday afternoon that he 
believes the death penalty referendum will get enough signatures to be placed 
on the ballot and that Nebraskans will reinstate the death penalty.

And he predicted that no one on death row in Nebraska will be executed as a 
result.

Gloor, who voted to repeal Nebraska's death penalty statute, said he has no 
objection to executing a person who has taken the life of another person.

He said he voted to repeal the death penalty because he became convinced it is 
now impossible for Nebraska to successfully carry out an execution. It was 
conservative state senators - including Tea Party senators - who finally 
convinced him of that fact.

Gloor said those state senators also demonstrated to him that it costs twice as 
much to keep condemned prisoners on death row as it does to keep a person in 
prison for life.

He said the increased cost is because death row is a separate facility with its 
own rules for taking care of condemned prisoners.

Gloor said there are prisoners who have been on Nebraska's death row for 10 
years, 20 years and even 30 years.

Because of Nebraska's inability to carry out an execution, he said, prisoners 
sentenced to life and those sentenced to be executed are spending exactly the 
same length of time in jail - "the rest of their lives."

Gloor said the death penalty is an extremely emotional issue for people on both 
sides of it. One person whom he has known for a long period of time gave him 
the message that he is "no longer welcome in Grand Island," he said.

Families of people who have been killed and who have seen people sentenced to 
death for the crime have told him they very much favored the death penalty 
because they wanted to see the murderer get a just punishment for his crime, 
Gloor said. However, many family members have said they have since changed 
their minds after they have waited year after year to see the death penalty 
carried out.

As a result, they now say they oppose the death penalty and would rather see a 
sentence of life in prison because an immediate and definitive sentence would 
give them closure, he said.

Talking with those family members face-to-face also had a big impact on his 
vote, Gloor said.

He pointed out that no execution has been carried out under the administrations 
of several governors, as well as numerous people who have been elected to the 
office of Nebraska attorney general.

That also solidifies his belief that Nebraska has reached the point at which it 
will never carry out another execution.

Gloor's remarks on the death penalty came as part of an overall review of the 
2015 legislative session.

(source: The Grand Island Independent)






USA:

Fates Worse Than Death?----Justice Kennedy's own logic shows why he should make 
the Supreme Court abolish capital punishment.


In some ways Justice Anthony Kennedy has spent years chipping away at the death 
penalty. He has been a leader in the Supreme Court's move to limit some classes 
of criminal defendants (for instance, juveniles) from being executed for their 
crimes. Keenly attuned to what the rest of the world thinks about capital 
punishment, he has been careful to confine the ways it is practiced in this 
country.

As a consequence, some have expressed hope that he is poised to do away with 
the death penalty altogether. He probably isn't. Only 2 weeks ago, he sided 
with the 4 other conservative justices in Glossip v. Gross - a case that not 
only upholds the constitutionality of capital punishment but permits states to 
use a drug that has almost certainly resulted in a slew of excruciating botched 
executions. The 5 justices who voted to allow this practice - described in 
Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent as "the chemical equivalent of being burned 
alive" - did so on the stunning legal theory that because some method of 
execution must be constitutional, there must be some constitutional means of 
carrying it out, and thus the use of the drug midazolam as part of the lethal 
injection cocktail must be constitutional.

So no, Kennedy is not about to take the position - advanced from the bench for 
the first time in a long time by Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader 
Ginsburg in Breyer's lengthy dissent in Glossip - that capital punishment, as 
it is currently practiced, almost certainly violates the Constitution and 
should be abolished in the United States. But Kennedy should take that 
position. And if you read a surprising concurrence he recently wrote in an 
unrelated case, Davis v. Ayala, it's clear that Kennedy's own logic should get 
him there. His newfound concerns about the practice of ditching prisoners for 
decades in solitary confinement are in no way unrelated to the concerns about 
who we execute in America and how.

Of course capital punishment and solitary confinement are apples and oranges. 
As Justice Antonin Scalia was quick to point out in his concurrence in Glossip, 
the framers of the Constitution explicitly contemplated that executions were 
permissible. But if you consider the arguments laid out in Kennedy's new, 
poignant call for Americans to re-examine their current solitary confinement 
policies, virtually every argument he makes could be applied to the death 
penalty as well.

The Ayala case concerned procedural matters in a capital trial; it actually has 
nothing directly to do with solitary confinement. But Kennedy used the occasion 
to write an impassioned concurrence, citing Dickens and British prison 
reformers, observing that the "condition in which prisoners are kept simply has 
not been a matter of sufficient public inquiry or interest." He goes on to 
note, of the capital sentencing system as it currently exists, that "in many 
cases, it is as if a judge had no choice but to say: 'In imposing this capital 
sentence, the court is well aware that during the many years you will serve in 
prison before your execution, the penal system has a solitary confinement 
regime that will bring you to the edge of madness, perhaps to madness itself.'"

Another subtle play for Kennedy's someday-vote goes to the question of how 
"unusual" the death penalty has become.

One senses that it's not just the cruelty of decades of solitary confinement 
that is bothering Kennedy here, but rather the inertia on the part of the 
American public and the legal community and what he claims to be "society's 
simple unawareness or indifference." His plea for more research, more 
vigilance, and more awareness of what he describes as "what comes next" 
following an adjudication of guilt could just as easily be deployed to ask 
about what comes next for those who are adjudicated guilty and then executed in 
ways that are painful and racially and geographically discriminatory, in a 
system that says more about the quality of your lawyer than the brutality of 
your crime. It is more than a bit ironic for Kennedy to worry about the ways 
capital defendants are detained in prison but to be altogether sanguine about 
the way they are executed.

This is why Breyer's lengthy dissent in Glossip, calling for an end to capital 
punishment, seems all but written to appeal to Kennedy. As Evan Mandery, author 
of A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America, 
noted in this post for the Marshall Project, "Breyer's tour de force 
exploration of the failings of the death penalty reads like what George 
Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen calls a 'Kennedy brief' - in 
which 'lawyers on both sides fall over themselves to court Kennedy's favor by 
repeatedly citing the opinions of Justice Kennedy.'" Why is Breyer quoting 
death-penalty-doubter Kennedy back at death-penalty-embracer Kennedy? Because, 
as Mandery posits, "it seems reasonable to surmise that Breyer thinks (or at 
least recognizes that people might think he thinks) that Kennedy's vote is 
available, and that the bar should act while the irons are hot in the fire."

Indeed, as Mandery astutely observes, it's no accident that Breyer's Glossip 
dissent focuses on arguments about the "cruelty" of solitary confinement, 
explicitly citing Kennedy's Ayala dissent, "even though solitary confinement 
has not traditionally been a major weapon in the artillery of constitutional 
arguments against capital punishment." Why does Breyer explicitly connect the 
2? Because a Kennedy worried about the cruelty inherent in an arbitrary and 
sordid system of solitary confinement can't be completely blind to the cruelty 
inherent in the arbitrary and sordid ways we administer capital punishment. 
Thus, Breyer begins his section on the "cruelty" of the death penalty system by 
noting that nearly all death penalty states keep death row inmates in isolation 
for "22 or more hours per day." Breyer goes on to add that the U.N. special 
rapporteur on torture has called for bans on solitary confinement for longer 
than 15 days. (You can be sure that this citation to the U.N. is not for 
Scalia's benefit).

Breyer then segues to the cruel uncertainty inherent in delaying deaths for 
years and years while prisoners languish in solitary. The 35 people executed in 
2014 spent, on average, nearly 18 years on death row. As Breyer puts it:

The dehumanizing effect of solitary confinement is aggravated by uncertainty as 
to whether a death sentence will in fact be carried out. In 1890, this Court 
recognized that, "when a prisoner sentenced by a court to death is confined in 
the penitentiary awaiting the execution of the sentence, one of the most 
horrible feelings to which he can be subjected during that time is the 
uncertainty during the whole of it." The Court was describing a delay of a mere 
4 weeks. In the past century and a quarter, little has changed in this respect 
- except for duration. Today we must describe delays measured not in weeks, but 
in decades.

In other words, Breyer is saying that if decades of delays in solitary 
confinement worry the humanitarian in you, then the fact that they end in 
capital punishment should worry you as well.

In another subtle play for Kennedy's someday-vote, the rest of Breyer's opinion 
in Glossip goes to the question of how "unusual" the death penalty has become - 
and this requires a ritual Counting of the States, a procedure used by Kennedy 
himself when he attempts to divine whether there is a "national consensus" 
about whether various punishments violate the cruel-and-unusual restrictions of 
the Eighth Amendment. When Kennedy has led the court in recent years in finding 
that certain classes of people (for example, juveniles or the intellectually 
disabled) can't be executed because there is a national consensus against it, 
he has used the state-counting methodology to get there.

So, for instance, in last year's under-the-radar case of Hall v. Florida, a 
case that was supposed to be about intellectual disability and the death 
penalty, Kennedy used some interesting math when it came time to count states. 
As criminal defense lawyer David Menschel pointed out at the time, Kennedy 
counted Oregon as a state that had abolished the death penalty even though it 
had been done by way of a moratorium from the governor, and he counted states 
that have the death penalty but don't use it as examples of "de facto 
abolitionism." In this context, Breyer's painstaking effort to track death 
penalty abolition states in Glossip is a callout to Kennedy. And when Breyer 
counts the same states Kennedy counted as all but abolishing it in Hall, what 
he is saying is that Kennedy led us here, and Kennedy should finish the job.

It is hardly inconsequential that Breyer and Kennedy are, respectively, the 
most conservative liberal and the most liberal conservative on the court today, 
as David Cole pointed out recently in the New Yorker. As Cole put it: "the fact 
that the Court's 2 most moderate Justices would, on their own, raise questions 
about these practices is further evidence not only that the brutality and 
harshness of the American criminal-justice system is out of hand but also that 
concern about it has reached the highest levels of government." Breyer has had 
enough of the death penalty, and Kennedy has had enough of solitary 
confinement, and not all that much ground necessarily separates the 2. If one 
accepts that the criminal justice system is hopelessly tainted by arbitrary and 
cruel policies that torture and dehumanize prisoners for no discernible reason, 
it's hard to look at any one policy in isolation without seeing the cruelty and 
arbitrariness at work in the aggregate. And Kennedy's principal worries about 
solitary confinement - that the public isn't upset enough and that judges' 
hands seem to be tied - are also true of capital punishment; the only 
difference seems to be that Kennedy doesn't want to drive people mad before we 
kill them, and Breyer believes that our whole system for killing people is mad.

So Kennedy may not come around on the death penalty. But - after reading his 
own words in Ayala - he probably should. Kennedy closes with the observation 
that "over 150 years ago, Dostoyevsky wrote, 'The degree of civilization in a 
society can be judged by entering its prisons.'" But the inhumanity, racial and 
regional disparities, and madness-inducing cruelties of the criminal justice 
system hardly stop at what Kennedy describes as a "windowless cell no larger 
than a typical parking spot." If we are going to take seriously his call for a 
harder, clear-eyed look at the flaws in the criminal justice, the road to 
reform may start with solitary confinement, but it cannot coherently end there.

(source: Dahlia Lithwick, slate.com)

**********************

James Holmes set to learn fate 3 years after Colorado movie theater shooting


12 people who'd gone to a Colorado movie theater for an evening's entertainment 
never came home. Seventy who'd wanted to see "The Dark Knight Rises" found 
themselves wounded in an all-too-real barrage of gunfire. And one man, James 
Holmes, was responsible for it all.

There's no question that Holmes walked into the crowded Aurora theater and 
unleashed a torrent of bullets on unsuspecting moviegoers on July 20, 2012.

What is in question is if he'll be found guilty of the bloodshed and, if so, 
what penalty he'll face.

Jurors began deliberating his fate Wednesday, one day after attorneys from both 
sides offered their closing arguments.

There's no clear timetable on when a decision will be reached on Holmes and the 
165 charges he faces. But when it comes, it will close a chapter in what has 
been a long, grueling journey -- more than 11 weeks of trial, about 6 months 
after the start of jury selection, and some 3 years after the nightmare began 
for families in and around the suburban Denver community.

By virtue of his pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, the now 27-year-old 
Holmes has never denied he was behind the killing.

But given his mental state, his lawyers contend that he should not be found 
culpable.

"The evidence is clear that he could not control his thoughts, ... he could not 
control his actions, and he could not control his perceptions," defense 
attorney Dan King said during closing arguments. "... Only the mental illness 
caused this to happen and nothing else."

Yet prosecutors -- who called more than 200 witnesses to the stand, among them 
investigators, students who knew Holmes and his ex-girlfriend -- insisted the 
shooter knew very well what he was doing. He acted deliberately, if 
diabolically, to deliver pain and his mental issues shouldn't excuse him from 
paying the price, they argued.

"Look at the evidence, then hold this man accountable," Arapahoe County 
District Attorney George Brauchler said. "Reject this claim that he didn't know 
right from wrong when he murdered those people and tried to kill the others...

"That guy was sane beyond a reasonable doubt, and he needs to be held 
accountable for what he did."

'Like a deer in the headlights'

Having bought a ticket 12 days earlier, Holmes walked into the theater #9 
screening of "The Dark Night Rises" like other patrons. He then walked out 
through a rear door, which he left propped open.

Just after midnight, some 18 minutes after the movie began, he -- with his 
bright red-orange hair looking like the Joker, the Batman villain, as portrayed 
by late actor Heath Ledger in an earlier movie -- returned wearing a ballistic 
helmet, a gas mask, black gloves and protective gear for his legs, throat and 
groin.

A tear gas canister exploded in the theater, then gunfire erupted from an AR-15 
rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun and at least one .40 caliber handgun. The real-life 
horror story ended with Holmes' arrest outside the theater about 7 minutes 
after the first 911 calls were made to police.

But it wasn't in time to save the lives of Jonathan Blunk, Alexander Boik, 
Jesse Childress, Gordon Cowden, Jessica Ghawi, John Thomas Larimer, Matthew 
McQuinn, Micayla Medek, Alex Sullivan, Alexander Teves, Rebecca Ann Wingo and 
the youngest victim, 6-year-old Veronica Moser-Sullivan.

During the trial, prosecutors detailed the nightmare, describing the scores of 
spent shells, pellets and casings, as well as the accompanying bullet holes. 
They played a graphic 45-minute video showing bloodied bodies scrawled across 
the floor and aisles, some contorted and others in fetal positions. They noted 
more than 200 live rounds were never fired, though it's hard for anyone to 
fathom it could have been worse.

"I was like a deer in the headlights. I froze. I wasn't able to process what 
was going on," Kimberly Avra testified of her reaction before a friend pulled 
her to the ground. "So I sat there and stared at it (the shooter)."

Holmes' parents, changing hair color, medication

Who was James Holmes?

Prosecutors painted a picture of a once-promising neuroscience student who knew 
exactly what he was doing, both carrying out the attack and rigging his 
apartment with makeshift explosives ahead of authorities' arrival.

"Nothing was random," said FBI Special Agent Christopher Rigopoulos, who was 
part of the evidence collection team who saw how Holmes' apartment contained 
pickle jars filled with napalm and bullets linked together, plastic soda 
bottles filled with gasoline and other dangerous concoctions.

Those who spent time with Holmes as a PhD student at the University of Colorado 
Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora described him as quiet and socially awkward, 
but seemingly not "detached from reality."

Fellow student Jessica Cummiske recalled that one thing about Holmes' eyes 
really stood out. "There was more than one occasion where his pupils were 
completely blown out. It was shocking, stunning," she said.

In fact, defense attorneys repeatedly highlighted Holmes' dilated eyes during 
cross-examination.

But this line of defense is controversial. For more than 100 years, mental 
health experts have studied pupil dilation, but it hasn't yet proved to be a 
way to diagnose psychiatric conditions, according to Slate magazine and "The 
Handbook of Clinical Neurology."

While many acquaintances, medical professionals and others weighed in on his 
mental state during the extensive trial, Holmes did not -- declining to testify 
on his own behalf.

That leaves jurors to sort through all the evidence and testimony to decide for 
themselves if he was or was not sane.

Psychiatrist: Admitted to 'homicidal thoughts'

Holmes' lawyers never denied that their client was responsible for the mass 
shooting, one of the worst in U.S. history. Their argument throughout the trial 
was that he'd been mentally off all along.

Months before the shooting, Dr. Lynne Fenton said Holmes told her he had 
"homicidal thoughts" as often as three or four times a day. As his treatment 
progressed, he told her his obsession with killing was only getting worse.

Yet the psychiatrist explained that she didn't place him in a psychiatric hold 
because he never disclosed his intention to kill or named a target. Nor did he 
talk about feeling manic or depressed or seeing "flickerings" or other 
hallucinations, as he did in a notebook Holmes mailed to her.

Dr. Jeffrey Metzner, a court-appointed psychiatrist, testified that "despite 
having mental disease or defect, Mr. Holmes (could) tell the difference between 
right from wrong."

"It is my opinion," Metzner said, "that Mr. Holmes, at the time of the 
commission of the alleged acts, met the criteria for legal sanity."

When pressed by the defense -- which addressed during the trial the depths of 
Holmes' psychosis and delusions, asserting that he has schizophrenia -- Metzner 
added that the shooting was a direct result of mental illness. Lawyer Daniel 
King then asked if the shooting wouldn't have taken plane if not for Holmes' 
condition.

Correct again, the psychiatrist stated.

Mother: 'Mentally ill ... need treatment, not execution'

If the jurors decide to convict Holmes on multiple murder charges, the next 
question would be what price he'll pay.

Back in 2013, the prosecution signaled it would seek the death penalty.

"It is my determination and my intention that in this case, for James Eagan 
Holmes, justice is death," Brauchler said then.

The shooter's parents, Robert and Arlene Holmes, were regulars in court during 
their son's trial. They were there again Tuesday, packed into the room 
alongside survivors and family members of some of the dead.

They have not talked to reporters. But they have written 2 open letters and 
published a prayer book detailing the family's internal struggle and pleading 
for their son's life.

In a December 2014 letter published in the Denver Post, the couple said "we 
have spent every moment for more than 2 years thinking about those who were 
injured, and the families and friends of the deceased who were killed, in the 
theater shooting in Aurora.

"We are always praying for everyone in Aurora. We wish that July 20, 2012, 
never happened."

Still, while they don't deny James Holmes was behind the carnage, the parents 
said they didn't think he should have been put on trial, much less be convicted 
and possibly face the death penalty, given his mental state.

"(James Holmes) is not a monster. He is a human being gripped by a severe 
mental illness," his parents wrote. "We believe that the death penalty is 
morally wrong, especially when the condemned is mentally ill."

(source: CNN)