A jury on Thursday afternoon found James Holmes guilty of all 165 charges against him related to a July 2012 attack at an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater. Holmes, 27, was found guilty of first degree murder, including with "extreme indifference," attempted murder and explosives offenses.
The jury began deliberating Wednesday morning and the decision was reached in just 13 hours, a short deliberation for a case that had 10 weeks of testimony.
Holmes killed 12 people and injured 70 others after entering a showing of The Dark Knight Rises and shooting into the crowd. He was arrested outside of the theater. It took the judge an hour to read the 165 guilty verdicts, much longer than the minutes it took for Holmes, armed with three guns, to spray the theater with bullets.
Can't say as this surprised me much. Holmes may have been schizophrenic but that is not enough to explain systematically killing twelve people and wounding seventy others.
Of course it does not exactly escape me that on the very day that this dark chapter in gun violence in America comes to a close a brand new chapter opens up in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Just imagine how nice it would be to go an entire year without reading about a mass shooting in our country.
Perhaps somebody in Britain, or Australia, or Sweden, or just about anywhere else in the civilized world could tell us what that's like.
Hi all...it's been a while. I'm over at the pond, logged in as "Cletus LaFeti"...I'm playing subtle, i want to see how long it takes "Ian" to get it...fucksticks, the whole soft cranium lot of em:-)
ReplyDeleteYou bad bad boy! You gave her an IQ over 200?
Deletebwahahahaha!
Well if IQ stood for I Quit and 200 stands for how many times i' would say that's about right.
DeleteThey erased you Cletus, but I have to say you are some talented Fetus!
DeleteThat was fun. They have folks reading here...one paste eater showed up and blew all the inside jokes.
DeleteSo, are they going to execute him or put him in prison? I've been following this only peripherally so am not sure.
ReplyDeleteHis sentencing comes later.
DeleteHave a look at Dakota Meyer's Facebook page to see his (predictable) response to the sad event in Chattanooga.
ReplyDeleteWhy aren't the conservatives celebrating this massacre as a victory for the 2nd Amendment? Few people exercise their rights so zealously.
ReplyDeleteOh wait I forgot what the NRA tells me. Guns don't kill people. This killer was just really good at chucking bullets.
Scary thought: somewhere somebody's sister just came home with a guy who looks like Holmes as the new man in her life :O . Gryph, please find an excuse to put up a handsome picture of Levi soon.
ReplyDeleteThe NRA keeps saying that mass shootings are a regrettable anomaly. But when it happens every single day, you can no longer claim that it's the rare exception.
ReplyDeleteThis is exactly what the NRA wants, the entire population of the United States living in fear. They hope we will arm ourselves and enrich their buddies the gun manufacturers. The NRA, doing their best to destroy America.
He looks like a Palinbot.
ReplyDeleteAn entire year? I'd settle for an entire month or week!
ReplyDeleteWhen the Brits, Aussies and others tell about not being in fear of mass shootings, ask them how it feels to have Universal Health Care also, too!! My relaties in the UK would not trade their system for ours EVER. We are not reaspected anywhere in the world anymore. They DO love our President, and admire him and his family. Too bad more people in THIS country do not respect him like they should.
ReplyDeleteActually, Autralia used to have a problem with this kind of gun violence, until they passed some commonsense regulation and amazingly haven't had one in a decade since. Their wingnutz used the EXACT SAME arguments that ours do, but the politicians, even the right wing ones, actually did the right thing even though it cost many of them their political careers.
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVuspKSjfgA
Okay, I'm not sure you really want other people from other countries sticking their noses into the conversation, but okay. So this is from Canada.
ReplyDeleteAn incident happened a few years ago when an American visited Canada. This story is emblematic of the differences on the two sides of the border. He was visiting Calgary with his family while the Stampede was in progress, to be specific. This man was approached in a public park in broad daylight. He was asked if he had been to the Stampede yet; the questioner was approaching people because he was giving out complimentary tickets for his organization. The American, a police officer from Michigan, became really defensive. He felt defenceless because Canadian law did not permit him to carry a gun, "to protect his family". Once he got home, he wrote a letter to the editor expounding on the unsafe conditions in Canada. In Canada, only criminals and police officers have guns, he stated.
Outside of hunting rifles, yeah, pretty much. I don't hang around in places populated by criminals and if I did run into a situation, the response rate by police in a real emergency is pretty darn good. So I feel really safe. If I make a bone-headed mistake in traffic or I show up at the wrong house, it never occurs to me that somebody could respond with a gun.
Police officers, equipped with a gun, recognize that every day at work could potentially result in a discharge of his / her weapon and the death of a human being. That has to be a stressor, innate to the profession. Meanwhile, in the USA, a John Q Citizen routinely takes a concealed weapon along on daily activities. I am curious as to the long-term effects of thinking that today may be the day that I discharge my gun, making a judgement that will be a life and death situation.
Well, I live in Michigan and I've never felt the need to be armed.
DeleteBeaglemom
What's The Stampede?
Delete*sigh* one less nutjob in Bristle's pool of future baby daddies.
ReplyDeleteo/t Boys Will e Boys movie cancelled. LA. gov signed cap to filmakr tax credits and investors backed out.
ReplyDeleteIt has been a long three years since this happened. Three years of life this man has had that my friend AJ and the eleven others didn't get to have. I was so relieved to see the jury didn't buy his false defense and I hope they continue to do the right thing and sentence him to death next. We are the only country that has this problem. Something needs to change. Now.
ReplyDeleteGryphen, he has such Republican eyes. Will this conviction impact his plans to seek the GOP presidential nomination for 2016? He would be an interesting VP candidate on Trump's ticket, dont you think?
ReplyDeleteI hope that this guy gets 165 consecutive terms in prison.
ReplyDeleteBeaglemom
I watched the coverage on MSNBC. as each victim's name was used in the judge's reading, they split the screen and showed the face of the person killed and barely showed this criminals face except for a side view and much smaller than the victims.
ReplyDeleteThe burden to prove legal insanity is much higher than a medical condition that can be helped with therapy and medication, but once one is of age, you can't force them to take their meds.
The prosecutor used his own actions (buying three weapons, thousands of rounds, and high capacity clips) Along with his rant about wanting to kill many many more, which pretty much showed he was sane enough to plan, equipt and implement this mass execution.
I'm so glad the jury didn't buy it. And, although I'm against the death penalty, this is one case that's really making me reconsider. Consecutive life in prison without a chance of parole just seems like a slap on the wrist. But I'm fine with that, what would killing him humanely accomplish, when those victims didn't have the luxury of the same options?
Another "news source" twisted the facts and felt that this would cause more blowback from the liberals for stricter gun control laws, well duh??? The laws as they are didn't work, he had mental illness, yes, but that's not what drove him to kill, it's the gun culture and fetishism of implements that kill.
Columbine, the killing of kids in Connecticut, and the individual losses of live that occur daily have numbed and desensitised "the bad guys with guns" to the horror and pain "The good guys without guns" feel when they see real people lose their lives.