Media, Justice, and the Dark Knight Shooter
For friends and family members of the shooting that happened in a movie theater showing The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado, on July 20, 2012, there is no doubt that James Holmes committed the crime with the intention of hurting people.
It has been labeled, until the Orlando nightclub shooting last year and, more recently, the shooting in Las Vegas, the shooting with the most casualties in the United States. The act of violence that resulted in 12 casualties and 70 injured rocked the nation with its impact.
Even Batman himself, Christian Bale, was horrified by what happened and visited victims in the hospital.
Across the web, there are masses of people who believe that Holmes was mentally ill and should not be punished for the crime, or that no crime was in fact committed.
The high-profile case lasted for more than three months, though according to this article by CNN, “Before the trial began, nobody disputed that Holmes was the gunman in black.”
The defense initially wanted Holmes to plea guilty to avoid receiving the death penalty, but was denied doing so. The judge announced that Holmes would face the maximum sentence.
Holmes’ defense advised him to plea insanity instead. In his youth, Holmes had been diagnosed with Schizophrenia and in the months before he had been seeing a counselor at the University of Colorado, confiding to her his tendencies to want to hurt people.
During the months of the trial, the media and people were in an outcry questioning Holmes’ mental heath. Was he aware of what he was doing and could distinguish between right and wrong, or could he not, and was, therefore, insane according to Colorado legislature?
The difference between these two convictions was if Holmes was found sane, he could face the death penalty. If he was found mentally ill, he would face life in prison or possibly not even guilty.
Social media ignited with polar opinions. Some people defending Holmes and said the shooting was a cause of untreated mental illness and some even went so far to say that Holmes committed no crime.
In some extreme cases, like the one seen above, people began calling themselves “Holmies” and began sending him pictures, fan mail and even thousands of dollars in cash.
Others said that Holmes should be convicted mercilessly. One quote from a forum states, “I say he gets the death penalty. Who cares about whether he is sane/insane/whatever. He killed innocent people, he does not deserve life.”
In the media, questions arose whether Holmes was claiming mental illness to avoid a death sentence. Since Holmes’ defense decided to try a plea bargain first, the insanity plea looked even less convincing.
In psychiatrist Jeffrey Metzner’s conclusions, he found that Holmes was not insane because he could declare what was right from what was wrong.
In the end, after more than 9,000 jurors were summoned — the largest of any case in history, and Holmes was sentenced to 12 life sentences and an additional 48 years in prison without parole. He narrowly avoided the death penalty because jurors were not able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Holmes was sane at the time he committed the crime.
The takeaway from this is that mental illness is really misunderstood in the United States. No matter if Holmes is sane or insane, he killed 12 people and that will never change.
The question that rose with this shooting, like every shooting before and after: Are we doing enough to recognize and treat mental illness? It has a complex answer. Mental illness has been revered as a problem in society and it complicates how to deal with getting help and often effects how we see acts of violence.
It’s a yet larger critique of the ethics of the legal system to say that there was a certain way this case should have gone. The verdict happened to fall right down the middle: Holmes got to keep his life with a certain amount of publicity every year and will live the rest of his life in prison where he can no longer pose a danger to society as “the Joker.”
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