At Holmes’s first courtroom appearance on July 23, he sat next to his lawyer, Tamara Brady, the chief trial deputy for the Colorado Public Defender’s office. The photo of them side-by-side that day would become an iconic image of the massacre. With his outlandish curly orange hair and glazed eyes, he looked absent. She looked in shock. Brady and the other lead defense attorney, Daniel King, were members of the Public Defender’s death penalty team, as this was likely to turn into a capital punishment case. In 2006, King had defended Sir Mario Owens, who was found guilty of murdering a pair of witnesses testifying against him and sentenced to death row. Now they were faced with defending an even more notorious client.
Observing the dulled-out Holmes in court was haunting for several reasons. His murderous plans had unfolded not on society’s fringes, but in the very heart of a medical and psychiatric community devoted to understanding science and human behavior—and using that knowledge to improve our lot. Within the past eighteen months, Holmes had written when applying to graduate school, “Rational people act based on incentives for self-fulfillment, including fulfilling needs of self-development and needs of feeling useful and helpful to others . . . I look forward to fulfilling my quest to advance my knowledge, and I plan to use my critical thinking skills by studying the subject I am passionate about, neuroscience.” If his AR-15 had not jammed after thirty seconds, but kept working properly inside Theater Nine, no one could estimate how many others would have been maimed or killed.
Despite her previous experience with death penalty cases, Tamara Brady appeared stunned at finding herself in these circumstances. The lingering terror of the shootings was not just all over the faces of the victims’ relatives present in the courtroom, but stamped into the corners of Brady’s downturned mouth and lodged in the strain in her eyes. She’d been handed the case less than seventy-two hours earlier and, like everyone else, was trying to make sense of it. Her expression told you that it already was a very lonely job.
“You just can’t imagine,” says a private detective who’s worked on capital punishment cases in the Denver area for decades, “what it’s like to be in the position the defense lawyers are in after these mass shootings or other horrific crimes. While everyone else is focused on the police work and the victims, as they should be, the attorneys have a job to do under the law. They’re sitting just a few feet away from the victims’ families in the courtroom. They’re extremely aware of the suffering and loss those families are going through. They’re also highly aware of how much the public despises them for stepping in and offering the best legal representation they can to someone like James Holmes.
“They know that some people want to kill their client. They know that some people probably want to kill them. They can’t go anywhere without being asked about what they do for a living and why they do it and how can they live with themselves for doing it. In spite of what anyone thinks about them, they feel the tragedy that they’re now a part of. There’s no group of people involved in these events who are immune to the suffering. I feel for the victim’s families and for everyone else in this case.”
Brady’s eyes conveyed that what had happened three days ago at Century 16 wasn’t merely a crime, but a reflection of something more pervasive and disturbing running beneath American society. It reflected a new kind of violence, which some called terrorism, and a new emotional reality that had become normalized so quickly and so completely that it was easy to overlook. That reality was not just individual, but deeply social.
To experience it, all one had to do was click onto a hate-filled website or tune into an AM radio station or a cable-TV talk show and listen to hosts, guests, and callers tear apart people they’d never met and knew virtually nothing about. Under the First Amendment, they were free to proclaim their vitriol against anyone, free to accuse them of all manner of evil or criminal behavior—rape or child molestation or murder—regardless of the truth of any of these projections. Opinions now ruled and facts were irrelevant. Self-expression was all that mattered, regardless of what one was expressing. Venting and being “right” overrode every other consideration.
The producers of these shows often prodded guests and callers to engage in such demonizing because it made for more heated programming, which yielded better ratings, which made more money for everyone. In the past two decades, the nation had seen a bull market in public hatred and this had filtered down into every corner of our national life, from the media to religion to politics to heated daily interactions on sidewalks and street corners—and on into the hallways of colleges and secondary and primary schools. What had once been unacceptable was not merely acceptable now, but encouraged, promoted, pandered to, packaged, sold, and highly rewarded.
Conflict had become a commodity, something to be publicly bought and sold in the media marketplace. Divide the population, start a ferocious argument that no one can win, turn up the heat, sit back, watch the sparks fly, and cash in. Common ground was a quaint thing of the past . . . the object now was to win the argument, and there were no consequences for any of this behavior.
It really had no meaning at all, right? It was just part of the new entertainment industry, wasn’t it?
This ongoing war was intimate and intensely divisive—and by the first decade of the new millennium it had lasted nearly forty years, compared to the four years of the first American Civil War. No one was unaffected by this new emotional environment and no one could really escape it. While it had overtaken the cultural landscape, there was virtually nothing to counterbalance it—not even much awareness of how pervasive it had become—let alone a strategy for dealing with this fundamental change in our national life. If it was more difficult now for the “well-adjusted” individual to cope in this environment, what about the at-risk population?
The look in Tamara Brady’s eyes conjured up something like “mass shame”—and the sense that we were all somehow involved in these shootings, which kept happening again and again. The killers went undetected until it was too late, with law enforcement, psychiatrists, and the “expert” talking heads on television a beat or two behind them. The murders were so destructive and so incomprehensible that they transcended the legal system itself. The Aurora case wasn’t just about guilt or innocence, or about crime and punishment, or about sanity or insanity, but about trying to discover something about ourselves we hadn’t yet uncovered.
When the case began, the main questions were: Could the legal process help us understand more about the killer and the kind of violence he’d just unleashed? Would his spiral notebook give us insight into what had caused his descent into mass murder? Or would the legal process itself reflect back to us a larger problem?
As the courtroom proceedings unwound week after week, month after month, and then year after year, Brady’s face began to change and harden. She was committed to preserving Holmes’s doctor-patient confidentiality—and to keeping the spiral notebook away from the prosecution and public. The defense team also surmised that the DA’s office would one day make this a death penalty case (the prosecutors had gradually begun gathering input on this issue from eight hundred people who were either survivors of the massacre, or their relatives, or the kin of the deceased). If Holmes’s lawyers could do little or nothing to challenge his actual guilt as the shooter, they could fully commit themselves to saving his life. And they’d do so with a ferocity rarely seen before.
In one courtroom exchange with Aurora Police Detective Craig Appel, Brady brought up Appel’s questioning of Holmes on the day of the crime.
“Did you,” she asked, “tell him what he [Holmes] was telling you could be used to put him to death?”
With weariness and resignation, Appel replied, “There was too much death that day.”
While his attorneys fought in court for the defendant and Holmes sat beside them and stared into his lap, the victims’ relatives began a ritual that would continue through 2012, into 2013, and still beyond, leaning against one another and stifling tears or not being able to; stroking or rubbing one another’s backs, shoulders, arms, and hair; constantly touching each other for connection and comfort, while trying not to say anything out loud or make any extraneous noises, as they struggled to contain their feelings for the young man sitting just a few feet away. Almost all of the time, they succeeded.
During one hearing, Steve Hernandez, the father of victim Rebecca Wingo, cried out, “Rot in hell, Holmes!” The judge reprimanded Hernandez, but not very strongly, as if he understood the man’s plight.
The defendant would be charged with twenty-four counts of first-degree murder and 142 counts of attempted murder. His oldest homicide victim was fifty-one, while the youngest was six (the youngest survivor hit by gunfire was four months old). Following the rampage, some of the victims had been so bloodied that emergency medical personnel could not immediately tell if they were young or old, male or female, black or white. In spite of the horror at Century 16, and in spite of President Obama’s visit to Aurora right after the shootings, and in spite of the growing sense that this violent phenomenon had to be addressed at the highest levels of our government, the U.S. Congress wasn’t quite ready to introduce legislation regarding what an untrained civilian with an AR-15 and hundreds of rounds of ammunition could do in a crowded venue in less than one minute.
The sound of Holmes opening fire in the theater had been captured on audio and would be played in open court. It was the closest one could come to the feeling of being trapped in front of a semiautomatic rifle, without actually being there. While the victims’ relatives grieved and buried their loved ones, the survivors faced unmanageable medical bills (although local hospitals did waive some of the costs). They’d soon be publically fighting with the authorities over how to distribute the money raised to assist them.