Lawyers Differ on Questions Raised in Killer's Notebook

The spiral notebook is a road map to murder, filled with plans, diagrams and to-do lists that James E. Holmes laid out in scrupulous detail before carrying out a shooting rampage in a Colorado movie theater. In his own handwriting, he plans a "mass murder spree" and considers theaters and times to attack for "maximum casualties." He also plots his own psyche with pages of self-diagnosis of what he called his "broken mind."

As his murder trial enters its second month, this notebook has become a Rorschach test of the thoughts of Holmes, the neuroscience graduate student who killed 12 people in one of the country's worst mass shootings in recent years.

Prosecutors say he was sane and methodical, planning his actions with murderous intent. Defense lawyers, who have entered his plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, say his writing brims with "a whole lot of crazy" - delusions about death, human worth and "negative infinity" that were the product of a profoundly diseased mind.

The 12 jurors will be forced to examine the hazy border between mental illness and legal insanity. Key to the case is whether Holmes, despite his ravings and struggles with mental illness, was able to distinguish the difference between right and wrong and was legally responsible for his actions when he opened fire on a midnight movie screening in Aurora, Colorado, in July 2012.

On Thursday, a state psychiatrist said Holmes, 27, was indeed able to know the difference and was legally sane.

"Whatever he suffered from, it did not prevent him from forming the intent and knowing what he was doing and the consequences of what he was doing," said Dr. William Reid, a psychiatrist who performed a court-ordered examination of Holmes.

His testimony, the first from any of the mental health experts who have examined Holmes, provided crucial support for the prosecution. But it came in an unprompted opinion that drew an immediate objection from defense lawyers, who called for a mistrial, saying the jurors had heard testimony that muddied the legal standard for judging a person's sanity. Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr. refused their request.

But the dispute reflected the tense and sensitive nature of the issues at the heart of this death penalty case. And the district attorney, George Brauchler, was forced to talk to Reid outside the jury's presence to draw limits around what he could and could not say on the stand to avoid any other "missteps."

Reid spent about 22 hours interviewing Holmes, and jurors are expected to watch the entire video footage of his examination.

Reid said he had spent about 300 hours preparing for the July interview. He read the notebook, watched footage of Holmes in jail and talked to mental health professionals who had spoken with him. Two years had passed since the shooting, and Holmes had been taking antipsychotic medication and antidepressants when the two men met.

Jurors began watching the interview Thursday afternoon. In it, Holmes wears a navy jail smock and has a beard. The conversation opens with chitchat about his treatment ("I'm in solitary"), his routine ("Exercise, reading, sleeping") and his personality ("I'm kind of shy, I guess"), and edges toward his mental health history and the bloody minutes at the center of the case.

Prosecutors have said a second psychiatrist who examined Holmes for the court reached the same conclusion as Reid. Defense lawyers are expected to call their own experts, who will argue that Holmes was delusional and in a state of what they called "florid psychosis" the night of the shootings. The defense points to different pages of the notebook, ones bristling with nonsensical equations, ramblings about his "mind of madness" and pages covered with the word "Why?"

Colorado is one of just 11 states where prosecutors have the burden of proof in insanity cases. Most states and the federal courts put that burden on defendants.

Despite that hurdle for prosecutors, legal observers say Holmes' lawyers are facing huge obstacles. For weeks, people who lost friends and loved ones, or who were scarred or paralyzed by Holmes' bullets have taken the witness stand and recreated the bloody chaos inside Theater 9 that July 20. Their testimony has brought members of the gallery, and sometimes jurors, to tears.

"The more horrendous the attack is, the more heinous the behavior, the less juries are willing to consider insanity," said J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego.

But as the case pivots to delve deeper into Holmes' mind and his actions before and after the killing, experts say a growing collection of details suggest that he understood the gravity and wrongfulness of his plot.

His notebook is filled with such deliberations. Should he attack an airport? No, he decides, too much security. On a sketch of the Century 16 theaters he would attack, he noted that a police station was just three minutes' drive away. He wrote that he had a 99 percent chance of getting caught.

Prosecutors say that as he assembled an arsenal of guns, ammunition and explosives, he used a credit card to which only he had access, different from the family account he used to pay his rent and buy food.

On an AdultFriendFinder.com profile he completed days before the shooting, he wrote, "Will you visit me in prison?" After he was arrested just outside the theater, he asked two detectives at Aurora police headquarters, "There weren't any children hurt, were there?" (There were, including 6-year-old Veronica Moser-Sullivan, who was killed.)

Dr. Steven Pitt, a forensic psychiatrist in Arizona who has been closely following the case, said he had no doubt Holmes had a serious mental illness and had been "living his own internal nightmare for years." But he said that the accumulating evidence suggested Holmes "knew what he was doing, and what he was doing was wrong."