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| Colorado shooting suspect faces for |
| Colorado shooting suspect faces formal charges
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| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
, 30-July-2012
6:43:57 AM |
| Launching a case that legal analysts expect to be dominated by arguments over the defendant's sanity, Colorado prosecutors are filing formal charges on Monday against James Eagan Holmes, the former neuroscience student accused of killing 12 people and wounding 58 others at an Aurora movie theatre.
Attorneys also are arguing over a defence motion to find out who leaked information to the news media about a package the 24-year-old former neuroscience graduate student allegedly sent to his psychiatrist at the University of Colorado Denver.
Authorities seized the package July 23, three days after the shooting, after finding it in the mailroom of the medical campus where Holmes studied. Several media outlets reported that it contained a notebook with descriptions of an attack, but Arapahoe County District Attorney Carol Chambers said in court papers that the parcel hadn't been opened by the time the "inaccurate" news reports appeared.
Holmes allegedly began stockpiling gear for his assault four months ago, and authorities say he bought his weapons in May and June, well before the shooting spree just after midnight during a showing of the Batman film "''The Dark Knight Rises." He was arrested by police outside the theater.
Analysts say that means it's likely there's only one main point of legal dispute between prosecutors and the defence.
"I don't think it's too hard to predict the path of this proceeding," said Craig Silverman, a former chief deputy district attorney in Denver. "This is not a whodunit. ... The only possible defence is insanity."
Under Colorado law, defendants are not legally liable for their acts if their minds are so "diseased" that they cannot distinguish between right and wrong. However, the law warns that "care should be taken not to confuse such mental disease or defect with moral obliquity, mental depravity, or passion growing out of anger, revenge, hatred, or other motives, and kindred evil conditions."
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