William H. Reid

This is a forensic account of the life and crimes of James Holmes, a mass murderer who shot and killed 12 people and injured 70 more at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises on July 20, 2012 at the Century 16 cinema in Aurora, Colorado, US. His plea of insanity failed and the jury convicted him in 2014 of 24 counts of murder, 140 of attempted murder and an explosives offence. (The doubling of the number of murder and attempt charges was a consequence of the peculiarity of Colorado law, which recognises two distinct ways of committing the offences of murder and attempted murder.) He was sentenced to 12 consecutive life terms for the murders and a total of 3,318 years in prison for the remaining offences. In Colorado murder trials the jury first decides whether the offender is guilty of the offence and after a finding of guilt, goes on to determine whether the murderer must be sentenced to death. Though the jury rejected Holmes’ plea of insanity on the question of guilt it evidently concluded that his mental illness mitigated his crimes for it declined to recommend the death penalty. He is expected to spend the rest of his life in prison, without prospect of parole. Holmes was 24 years old when he opened fire on the cinema audience.
Dark Night in Aurora has specialist interest as an expert analysis of the Colorado process of bifurcated trial and the deployment of the expert opinion evidence on Holmes’ mental state leading up to the massacre. Holmes himself is of very little interest. He appears to fall within the Hannah Arendt’s well known characterization of horrific murderers who are essentially ‘banal’ in their criminality. Holmes’ account of his reasons for the massacre was superficial and inarticulate, reflecting his incapacity for empathy with his fellow human beings. Ample information on his life and the circumstances of the massacre is available on the internet for those who might be interested.
The author, William H Reid is an eminent forensic psychiatrist, a past president of the American Academy of Science and Law. He was appointed by the presiding judge during Holmes’ trial to provide neutral guidance on the contested question of Holmes’ sanity and legal responsibility. He had access to the extensive records compiled by the expert witnesses for the defence and prosecution and conducted extensive interviews with Holmes. The book is in two parts. The first half is an account of Holmes’ life culminating in the mass murder at the cinema. The second half, called ‘Aftermath’, includes substantial extracts from the interviews conducted by Reid, evidence of the expert psychological and psychiatric witnesses and a detailed account of the trial. As a consequence of this bifurcation, there is substantial and tedious repetition of much of the biographical material during the second half of the book..
Holmes was a brilliant undergraduate who began postgraduate studies in neuroscience at the University of Colorado, Denver. He terminated his studies a little more than a month before the massacre at the Century Theatre. He suffered from depression and during his postgraduate year had regular psychiatric counselling. Various diagnoses of his condition appear in the expert reports: depression, autism spectrum disorder, schizophreniform disorder, conditions short of outright psychosis. In his own account Holmes said that he killed his victims in order to alleviate his worsening depression. His psychiatrists were aware of his homicidal thoughts but had insufficient grounds to commence proceedings to detain him during his postgraduate studies.
His preparations for the massacre at the Century 16 cinema were meticulous and conducted in complete secrecy. They were, in fact, excessive in their elaboration. Holmes acquired armour and weapons far beyond his needs or competence some of which required specialist combatant training. The death toll would have been far higher had he been competent in their use. Though Holmes undoubtedly suffered from a serious mental illness, however the disease might be characterized, there could be no possibility of an acquittal on the ground of insanity. The Colorado criteria for exculpation on the ground of insanity are brutal in their simplicity. It was sufficient to prove the obvious facts that Holmes knew what he was doing and knew that other people would believe that he intended to do amounted to murder.
In the weeks before the massacre, Holmes kept a diary or notebook that he intended to be read by his psychiatric counsellors as a kind of testament after the shooting. Though Reid provides extensive summaries of the contents Holmes’ notebook is curiously unrevealing, juvenile in its rambling and incoherent account of his ‘philosophy’ and inarticulate in his attempts to explain his motives for the shootings. He believed that by killing other people he could accumulate what he called ‘human capital’ the value of which would increase incrementally with each person killed and that this accumulation of human capital would alleviate his depression. There is a complete absence of depth, penetration or intelligent acuity in the notebook. Equally juvenile are the selfies he posted on the internet posing with his weapons and orange-dyed hair and pulling ‘devilish’ facial expressions. He said he ‘wanted to be remembered as a killer’. These images elicited a substantial fan mail, mostly from women who sent him money and photographs.
Prison is not a hospitable environment for self-discovery or moral development. One would like to believe, however, that Holmes might achieve some adequate moral understanding of the magnitude of his crimes in the wasted decades to come.… (plus d'informations)