Jury keeps death penalty option for Aurora gunman

Last month, the jury found the 27-year-old guilty of killing 12 people and wounding at least 70 others just days before the third anniversary of the 2012 massacre, which occurred during a midnight screening of Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises”.

Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. reminded jurors on Monday to stay away from news reports about the case and the recent theater shooting in Louisiana.

Jurors in the Colorado theater shooting trial are being sent home for the day after declining to rule out the death penalty for James Holmes.

The nine women and three men of the jury were asked to decide last Thursday whether circumstances such as Holmes’ mental illness, trouble-free childhood and lack of a prior criminal history reduce his “moral culpability” enough to justify sentencing him to life in prison without parole instead of death. She also lost an unborn child as the result of her injuries. They deliberated for less than three hours.

That verdict was reached in less than 12 hours of deliberations, with jurors rejecting defense arguments that Holmes suffered a psychotic break and was legally insane when he launched the massacre. But outside experts differed in their predictions of the final sentence. They finally ruled they were not satisfied with the defence argument and said he could still face death.

His attorneys have said that his schizophrenia mitigated the capital crimes for which he was convicted.

District Attorney George Brauchler said they will hear from “a father, a daughter, an ex-husband, a widow, a sister, a grandfather, a mom”. “We are far from over on this”.

“He was not a violent person”.

“He was not a violent person”, said Robert Holmes, the shooter’s father.

Holmes was a promising scholar in a demanding neuroscience Ph.D. program at the University of Colorado until his life went awry amid the pressures of laboratory work. In it, Holmes diagnosed himself with a litany of mental problems and methodically laid out his plans to kill.

Seventy others were wounded inside the packed theater in suburban Centennial, when Holmes, dressed in tactical clothing and wearing a gas mask, set off tear gas grenades and opened fire with semi-automatic weapons in July 2012.