James Holmes Gets Life Without Parole in Aurora Massacre Case

Hickenlooper granted Dunlap an indefinite reprieve, citing doubts about the fairness of Colorado’s death penalty.

A juror advised reporters outdoors courtroom that there was a single juror who refused to provide Holmes the dying penalty and two others who have been wavering. It is a devastating outcome it doesn’t matter what. That automatically eliminated the death penalty for Holmes. Defense attorneys had argued that Holmes was mentally ill.

James Holmes sits in court for an advisement hearing at the Arapahoe County Justice Center in Centennial, Colorado in this June 4, 2013 file photo.

The jurors returned the sentence Friday.

She said the graphic nature of the evidence made the 15-week trial very hard.

The families have become a tight knit group since the attack three years ago.

MARKUS: Brauchler said he wants to talk to the jurors and find out what he may have done that caused them to waiver on death.

Prosecutors countered that Holmes knew what he was doing and had written about his murderous plans in a diary. Twelve people were killed and 70 injured. “She just said she couldn’t do it”.

“My heart goes out to all the families”, Rancho Peñasquitos resident Ruth Head said.

Robert Sullivan, grandfather of the youngest victim, Veronica Moser-Sullivan, criticized the jury.

District Attorney George Brauchler said: “I still think death is justice for what that guy did, but the system said otherwise”.

A breakdown of the jury vote has not been released.

Lonnie Phillips, whose daughter Jessica Ghawi was killed, rubbed his wife Sandy’s shoulder as she leaned forward, weeping. She sagged into him and he held her up.

As the courtroom waited for Judge Carlos Samour to review the verdict, only the sound of him turning pages could be heard.

Jurors in the Colorado theater shooting have been dismissed after failing to agree on a sentence for gunman James Holmes. “If they do not, Holmes will be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole”. Numerous survivors shared grim accounts of how awful it was to see loved ones die before them and described the harrowing experience of being trapped in a dark theatre unable to move.

His defense team had earlier argued that the neuroscience graduate student was insane at the time.

As we reported last month, the guilty verdict came almost three years to the day of the shooting. Even when mentally ill killers are sentenced to death, the law requires that they remain sane enough to understand the nature of their punishment before an execution date can be set.

The judge, however, ruled the jurors could view it, but only once. “They will suffer for the rest of their lives, those that are living”. “He preferred life over death”.

The panel of nine women and three men deliberated for about an hour Thursday before going home without reaching a decision.

Defense lawyers said it was not hatred or a desire for notoriety that propelled Holmes to plot and carry out the massacre, but a deepening form of schizophrenia that infected his mind with powerful delusions that killing people somehow increased his “human capital”. Opposition and support for the death penalty have long crossed party lines in Colorado, both in public opinion polls and in the Legislature, where lawmakers also tried unsuccessfully to abolish the death penalty in 1999 and 2013. If even one juror dissents, the sentence is life in prison.