James Eagan Holmes was 24 years old when he killed 12 people and injured about 70 others in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb east of Denver, in the first hours of July 20, 2012. He had left a doctoral program in neuroscience at the University of Colorado a few weeks earlier. Aurora police arrested him within minutes, and he never contested that he was the man responsible. What his case put before a court was a narrower and harder question: whether, under Colorado law, he had been sane.
It took three years to answer. Prosecutors refused his offer to plead guilty in exchange for his life and announced that they would seek the death penalty. He entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, and two separate court-ordered sanity evaluations were carried out before a jury was chosen from a pool of about 9,000 summoned residents. On July 16, 2015, that jury rejected the insanity defense and found him guilty on all 165 counts. Three weeks later the same twelve jurors could not agree that he should be executed, and the law left a single outcome. On August 26, 2015, a district judge in Centennial sentenced him to 12 consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus 3,318 years. His lawyers said he would not appeal.
Holmes was born on December 13, 1987, and grew up in San Diego, in the Rancho Penasquitos area. He graduated from high school there in 2006. Friends later described a bright, sometimes awkward young man who was fascinated by science, and classmates and neighbors remembered him as quiet and private.
He went on to the University of California, Riverside, and earned a bachelor's degree in neuroscience there in 2010. In June 2011 he moved to Colorado and entered the neuroscience doctoral program at the University of Colorado's Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora, a competitive graduate program. He did not finish his first year. Shortly after his year-end examination in the spring of 2012 he began the paperwork to withdraw, and the university later said he had been in the process of leaving its graduate neurosciences program that June. He had no criminal history; Aurora officials said he had been stopped for a traffic violation in October 2011.
Twelve people died in Aurora on July 20, 2012, and about 70 were injured. The attempted murder convictions would later cover 70 people. The names of the dead were released the following day.
The youngest was a girl named Veronica, who had only recently learned to swim.
Jessica Ghawi had moved to Colorado from Texas about a year before, and she was a regular on Twitter.
John Larimer came from Crystal Lake, Illinois.
Alexander Boik played baseball and was known for his ability to make people laugh.
Jesse Childress lived in Thornton, Colorado, and his weeks ran on sports: softball on Mondays, bowling on Tuesdays. He loved comic books and superhero movies.
Jonathan Blunk had grown up in Reno, Nevada, and had most recently lived in Aurora.
Alex Sullivan loved the movies, comic books and the New York Mets.
Micayla Medek was from Westminster, Colorado, and liked nights out with friends and watching the Green Bay Packers. She was putting money aside for a trip to India.
Matthew McQuinn had moved to Colorado from Ohio.
Alexander Teves came from Phoenix, and he was remembered for how much he enjoyed a good meal.
Rebecca Ann Wingo followed Colorado Rockies baseball, liked action movies and always took a seat in the front row at church. A coworker remembered her as friendly and nearly always in a good mood.
Gordon Cowden lived in Aurora and loved the outdoors.
Aurora police took Holmes into custody in the city minutes after the killings.
He made his first court appearance on July 23, 2012, before the district's chief judge in Arapahoe County District Court in Centennial. A live video feed was allowed that day, and Holmes sat dazed and silent. He was held without bail. Within days the judge placed a gag order on the lawyers and on law enforcement, sealed the court file and barred the University of Colorado from releasing public records about Holmes's time as a student. A consortium of news organizations went to court to challenge the sealing of the file.
On July 30, 2012, at a 45-minute hearing closed to cameras at the defense's request, prosecutors from the Arapahoe County District Attorney's office filed formal charges. Holmes spoke once, to answer "Yes" to a question from the bench. The judge set a schedule: a hearing on August 9 on requests by news organizations to unseal court records, a hearing on August 16 on what evidence was protected by the privilege between Holmes and a university psychiatrist who had been treating him, a pretrial hearing on September 27, and a preliminary hearing tentatively set for the week of November 13. The defense, for its part, asked prosecutors to turn over the evidence they had collected. A victims' rights advocate was appointed for the case the same day.
The July 30 complaint charged 24 counts of first-degree murder, two for each of the 12 dead. Each death was charged once as first-degree murder after deliberation and once as first-degree murder with malice manifesting extreme indifference to human life. The complaint added 116 counts of attempted murder and a further count. The first-degree murder counts carried a minimum of life in prison and a maximum of death, and prosecutors said a decision on the death penalty could be months away.
The count grew as the case moved forward. By the time of the preliminary hearing it stood at 166, covering murder, attempted murder and further offenses, and it was on 166 counts that Holmes later entered his insanity plea.
The preliminary hearing ran for three days in the week of January 7, 2013. Prosecutors laid out the planning they attributed to Holmes and his behavior after his arrest. On January 10 the chief judge ruled that there was probable cause to believe Holmes had committed the crimes charged and bound him over for trial on all counts. He remained held without bail.
The arraignment had been expected the next morning, January 11. Holmes's lawyers told the court they were not ready to proceed to an arraignment, and the judge indicated that he would grant a postponement. When the case came back for arraignment on March 12, 2013, the defense still declined to enter a plea, saying it could not do so until prosecutors decided whether to seek death, and a standard plea of not guilty was entered on his behalf.
Late in March 2013 the defense disclosed in a court filing that Holmes had offered to plead guilty and serve life in prison without parole if he would not be executed. The prosecution answered in writing the next day. It said that no plea agreement existed and that one was extremely unlikely on the information available, and that the offer could not be considered genuine because the defense had refused to provide information needed to evaluate it.
On Monday, April 1, 2013, at a hearing in Centennial, prosecutors announced that the state would seek the death penalty. The chief judge had originally set the trial for August 5, 2013. By the time of the death penalty announcement he had handed the case to another district judge of the Arapahoe County court, who presided over it from then until the final sentence. The new judge set the trial for February 3, 2014, said he expected it to last about four months and turned down a defense request to push the start back to the summer or fall of that year.
Before Holmes could change his plea, his public defenders challenged the law that governs it. Colorado required a defendant who pleads not guilty by reason of insanity to submit to examination by court-appointed psychiatrists, and the defense argued that the provision was unconstitutional because it violated the privilege against self-incrimination. In late May 2013 the judge upheld the law.
On June 4, 2013, at a 90-minute hearing, Holmes entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity in place of the standard plea entered in March, and the judge accepted it. A trial was still scheduled for February 2014. Asked whether he had any questions about the consequences of the new plea, Holmes answered that he did not. The mandatory sanity evaluation followed later that year.
The defense position, from then to the end of the trial, was that he had suffered from schizophrenia and had been in a psychotic episode when he acted. His lawyers went further and argued that his interest in neuroscience had itself grown out of an effort to understand what was wrong with his own mind.
The first evaluation was completed in 2013. Its central finding, whether Holmes had been able to tell right from wrong, was never made public. Prosecutors objected to the examination and argued that the psychiatrist who conducted it had been biased. In January 2014 the judge agreed that the first evaluation was inadequate and flawed and ordered a second one.
The defense objected that the order was improper and violated Holmes's rights. On April 14, 2014, the judge rejected the attempt to block the second evaluation, kept it on hold in case the defense appealed and agreed to modify his instructions to the psychiatrist. He signed five orders that day, more than 80 pages of which were redacted. Two other questions were still open: a defense request to move the trial out of Arapahoe County because of the volume of media coverage, and a joint request by both sides to close part of a May 5 and 6 pretrial hearing on the questionnaire prospective jurors would fill out.
The second psychiatrist delivered a 53-page report to the court on October 15, 2014, together with videotaped interviews of Holmes. The judge sealed it. Lawyers on both sides received copies. Its findings, like those of the first report, were not released before trial.
At that point jury selection was set to begin on December 8, 2014. The defense asked for a few more weeks to review the second evaluation, and on Monday, October 27, 2014, the judge granted the request, moving the start of jury selection to January 20, 2015, with opening statements then planned for June 3.
Jury selection opened on January 20, 2015. About 9,000 Arapahoe County residents had been summoned, a pool described at the time as the largest the nation had seen, from which the court needed 12 jurors and 12 alternates. The process took nearly 12 weeks. The jury was seated on April 14, 2015: twelve jurors, nine women and three men, and twelve alternates. Opening statements were set for April 27.
The trial opened on April 27, 2015. The defense did not dispute that Holmes was responsible. The question for the jury was his mental state.
The prosecution called more than 200 witnesses over about two months, more than 70 of them survivors. Its case was that Holmes had planned the attack in detail over a long period, had concealed his intentions from his family, his friends and the psychiatrists who saw him, and knew exactly what he was doing. Jurors watched nearly 22 hours of videotape from the court-ordered sanity examination, in which Holmes confirmed most of the facts of what he had done. He declined to testify in his own defense.
The psychiatric evidence divided along the lines of the two sides. Two psychiatrists called by the defense, one of them a nationally recognized authority on schizophrenia, concluded that Holmes had been psychotic and legally insane. Two state-appointed doctors testified for the prosecution that, whatever his mental state, Holmes knew his actions were wrong.
The jury received the case in mid-July and deliberated for about 13 hours over a day and a half. On Thursday, July 16, 2015, it returned its verdicts. The judge's reading of the verdicts took more than an hour. The jury rejected the plea of not guilty by reason of insanity and found Holmes guilty on all 165 counts against him, including all 24 counts of first-degree murder, the attempted murder counts and the remaining further count.
The verdict, nearly three years after the killings, made Holmes eligible for death, and the same jury moved directly into the sentencing phase.
Colorado's capital sentencing at the time ran in stages, and the jury had to clear each one before it could reach the next. In the first, prosecutors had to prove at least one statutory aggravating factor. They put five before the jury. After deliberating from July 22 into July 23, 2015, the jurors found that the state had proven four of them. They did not find the factor alleging that Holmes had intentionally killed a child.
The second stage belonged to the defense. Its lawyers no longer argued insanity. They argued instead that schizophrenia, rather than free will, had driven him, and that his illness reduced his moral culpability enough to make a life sentence the right one. Former teachers and friends described a friendly child who had withdrawn as he grew older. On Monday, August 3, 2015, after deliberating for less than three hours across two days, the jury found on all 24 death-eligible murder counts that the aggravating factors outweighed the mitigating factors. Death remained possible.
In the final stage, which began on August 4, prosecutors presented testimony from victims about the harm the killings had caused, and both sides made their last arguments on punishment. Each juror then had to decide individually whether Holmes should be sentenced to death.
On Friday, August 7, 2015, the jury announced that it could not reach a unanimous decision for death on any of the 24 murder counts. Under Colorado law a death sentence required a unanimous jury, and a jury that could not agree produced a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole.
The jury's decision settled only the punishment for the murders. The sentences on the attempted murder counts and the remaining count were for the judge. The formal sentencing hearing in Centennial lasted several days, and more than 100 victims and survivors testified.
On Wednesday, August 26, 2015, the judge sentenced him to the maximum the law allowed: 12 life sentences without the possibility of parole, one for each person killed, plus 3,318 years, all to be served consecutively. The additional years comprised 3,312 years for the attempted murder convictions covering 70 people and six years for the remaining count. Holmes, in a red prison uniform and handcuffed at the waist, showed no reaction as he was led out. His defense lawyers said he would not appeal. The sentence came three years and 37 days after the killings.
The Colorado Department of Corrections took custody of Holmes after sentencing. Officials said at the time that his placement would follow an evaluation that included his mental health, and that he could be held in the department's psychiatric hospital or transferred to a prison outside the state. He was first held in a Colorado state prison and was moved on December 14, 2015, to another Colorado prison that houses mentally ill inmates, a transfer the department called routine.
He did not stay in the Colorado system. On September 27, 2017, the department confirmed that he had been placed in a federal prison. It said in a news release that the state had sought federal placement several months earlier, and that the move had waited until space became available at a facility able to provide appropriate security. The department did not say where he had been sent, and he has remained in federal custody since.
Holmes's responsibility for the deaths was never in dispute; his lawyers conceded it from the start. The contested question was his mental state. Two psychiatrists for the defense concluded that he had been legally insane, and two state-appointed doctors testified that he knew his actions were wrong. The findings of the first court-ordered evaluation, which the judge found inadequate, were never made public. The jury resolved the legal question by its verdict of July 16, 2015, rejecting the insanity plea on every count.
The jury's vote on death was not announced in court. Its verdict of August 7, 2015, established only that the jurors were not unanimous for death on any murder count; prosecutors said afterward that eleven had favored death and one had favored life without parole.
Accounts of the sanity-examination video also differ in length. Some reports put the footage jurors watched at nearly 22 hours; another described the recorded interview as lasting more than 22 hours.
December 13, 1987: James Eagan Holmes is born; he grows up in San Diego.
2006: He finishes high school in San Diego.
2010: He graduates from the University of California, Riverside, with a bachelor's degree in neuroscience.
June 2011: He enters the neuroscience doctoral program at the University of Colorado in Aurora.
June 2012: He begins withdrawing from the program.
July 20, 2012: Twelve people are killed and about 70 injured in Aurora; Holmes is arrested in the city within minutes.
July 23, 2012: First court appearance in Arapahoe County District Court; held without bail.
July 30, 2012: Formal charges filed, including 24 counts of first-degree murder.
January 10, 2013: After a three-day preliminary hearing, Holmes is bound over for trial on all counts.
March 12, 2013: Arraignment; a standard plea of not guilty is entered on his behalf.
March 27 to 28, 2013: The defense discloses an offer to plead guilty in exchange for life without parole; prosecutors reject it.
April 1, 2013: Prosecutors announce they will seek the death penalty; by then the case has been reassigned and trial set for February 3, 2014.
June 4, 2013: The court accepts a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.
January 2014: The judge finds the first evaluation inadequate and orders a second.
October 15, 2014: The second sanity report is delivered to the court and sealed.
October 27, 2014: The judge postpones the start of jury selection from December 8, 2014, to January 20, 2015.
January 20, 2015: Jury selection begins from a pool of about 9,000.
April 14, 2015: Twelve jurors and twelve alternates are seated.
April 27, 2015: Opening statements.
July 16, 2015: The jury rejects the insanity plea and convicts Holmes on all 165 counts.
July 23, 2015: The jury finds four of five aggravating factors proven.
August 3, 2015: The jury finds that aggravating factors outweigh mitigating factors.
August 7, 2015: The jury does not reach a unanimous decision on death; life without parole follows.
August 26, 2015: Formal sentence of 12 consecutive life terms without parole plus 3,318 years.
December 14, 2015: Moved within the Colorado prison system.
September 27, 2017: The Colorado Department of Corrections confirms his transfer to federal custody.