Insights Into The Mind of Madness

Published Mar 20, 2019, 8:00 AM

Shortly after midnight on July 20, 2012, in Aurora, Colorado, a man in dark body armor and a gas mask entered a midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises with a tactical shotgun, a high-capacity assault rifle, and a sidearm. He threw a canister of tear gas into the crowd and began firing. Soon 12 were dead and 58 were wounded; young children and pregnant women were among them.

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In May, a former British soldier named James Hadfield tried to kill the King of England. Hadfield fired a horse pistol on King George the Third as he entered the Theater Royal in London. He missed, but Hadfield didn't care. The delusional assassin was convinced that his own execution for the crime would bring about the second Coming of Jesus Christ. It didn't, but it did bring about a revolution in the criminal law. An enterprising lawyer saved Hadfield from the hangman's noose, and the man who had tried to shoot the king was found not guilty of treason by way of insanity. That case is the granddaddy of all modern day insanity defenses, including a present day massacre that led to the longest prison sentence in US history. Three fifteen and three fourteen. First shooting at Centre Theaters, fourteen Et Alameda Avenue. Somebody's suit in the auditorium over at the fun to the theater. Somebody is still sitting inside the number nine. Current employe. Yeah, all of our people, same theater nine where Batman was playing. We got another curt out place in the leg of female. I got people run it out of thee they're shot and learned night. I got coming down. When you're not coming down, you're up coming to start thinking somebody victims be a car. I got a whole bunch of people got out here. No rescue. Yeah, up the car and you're out of here. It was one of the worst mash shootings in American history. Twelve people killed and fifty eight injured. Seventy victims in all, so many the police turned the back seats of their cruisers into makeshift ambulances. But this mash shooting, perpetrated in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, was different. James Holmes, the Killer survived. I'm Sean Braswell and this is the thread. Each season we unraveled the stories behind some of the most important lives and events in history to discover essentially how one thing leads to another. This season, we revisit some of the most high profile criminal cases in history through the lens of the controversial legal defense that binds them together not guilty by way of insanity. We will see how this remarkable thread of insanity cases grows out of the trial of James Hadfield a hundred and continues to impact the law today. We begin, though, with that mass murder in Aurora, Colorado. Some of the details you're about to hear are horrific, but they were key to helping the jury in the case determine if the defendant was out of his mind at the time of the shooting. Five minutes after midnight on July twelve, twenty four year old James Egan Holmes strolled through the front doors of the Century sixteen Movie Theater in Aurora, Colorado. He stopped to hold the door open for two fellow theater goers who entered after him. Holmes calmly walked over to a kiosk and picked up his ticket for the late night showing of the new Batman movie, A Dark Night Rises. He wore dark, baggy cargo pants and a slightly crooked baseball cap that covered a mop of dyed orange hair. His hair was perhaps out of the ordinary, but there was nothing on the surface to distinguish homes from the dozens of casually dressed young men there to see the latest blockbuster about their favorite comic book. He row. Holmes entered theater nine and took a seat in the front row of the packed auditorium As the film started, are you I'll be damned? I was his friend, and it will be a very long time for someone inspires us. Minutes later, Holmes pretended to take a phone call. He left through the theater's emergency exit, careful to prop open the door behind him. When he returned from his part car to the theater, it was thirty eight minutes past midnight. This time, he wore dark body armor and a gas mask and carried a shotgun, a high capacity assault rifle, and a handgun. This is Dr William Reid, a court appointed psychiatric expert in the Holmes case. He walked into the theater from the screenside exit through the tear gas grenade across the theater, and he began shooting, primarily first with the shotgun. There's a moment where my daughter tripped in and I just pulled her up, and I was just dragging her, and I was just thinking, we just gotta get out, just even I just got to get out the doors. And even if this ball did just just get my kids out of here, it was it was just so worrible. Holmes walked slowly up and down theater aisles. He fired at random people with his shotgun until it was empty. Then he dropped it and began to fire with the assault rifle. Suddenly, his rifle jammed. He couldn't get it to unjammed and left the theater. He decided, in his words, the mission was over. He calmly walked out of the theater. He actually walked through some victim's blood as he walked toward his car. Police found Holmes waiting for them in a white Hunda sedan parked just behind the theater. They took him to Aurora Police headquarters and placed him in a bare interview room to await interrogation. Holmes is calm detached. An officer puts little paper bags over his hands and tapes them to his wrists a way of preserving gunpowder residue. Holmes plays with the paper bags as if they were hand puppets. Because homes surrendered, lawyers psychiatrists in the American public were given a rare chance to grapple with them. Asked murderer directly to glimpse inside the mind of someone who is both mentally ill and highly intelligent, to try to understand how an honor student named Jimmy from a loving family could transform into a crazed killer. James Holmes's crime was horrific and there was no doubt that he had done it. The question, rather was why Colorado prosecutor sought the death penalty. Holmes as lawyers fell back on a controversial criminal defense that he was not guilty by reason of insanity, and they painted a picture of James Holmes that was very different from the photos of the young man with orange hair that were all over the nightly news. To understand why his lawyers chose the insanity defense, we need to go back to his childhood, all right. Our next speaker is James Holme. Six years before the Aurora shooting, then eighteen year old Holmes gave a presentation to fellow summer interns at the prestigious Salt Constitute in Wlahoia, California. He just graduated from Westview High School and will be attending the University of California Riverside. His goals are to become a researcher and to make scientific discoveries. It's a good start in personal life. He enjoys playing soccer and strategy games, and his dream is to own a Slurpy machine. These kids have been fun to work with this summer. Holmes approaches the microphone. He's a skinny, geeky looking kid with big ears and a mop of hair brushed over his forehead. He wears an oversized button down shirt untucked. He's bright eyed, and like most of us, asked to give a presentation before a packed room of our peers, he is nervous and a bit awkward. Well. The lab by working is a computational neural biology lab, or CNL for short. That's right, James Holmes was not only a smart kid. He was an aspiring neuroscientist. My mentor, John Jacobson, who works in CNL, is a philosophical type of guy. He's interested in how we perceive reality. He also studies subjective experience, which is what takes place inside the mind as opposed to the external world. I've carried on his word and dealing with subjective experience. There was a reason James Holmes was interested in this area of research and why he wanted to be a neuroscientist. He knew something was wrong in his own head. He referred to it as his quote broken mind. There was nothing particularly unusual about him in his early years. Dr William read again a court appointed psychiatrist in the Holmes case and author of A Dark Knight in Aurora Inside James Holmes and the Colorado mass shootings. He went to school like everyone else and was particularly smart, I thought very well of by his teachers. The young boy from San Diego, California, known to everyone as Jimmy, had a very happy childhood. He had loving and attentive parents. His mom, a nurse, and his dad, as statistician, had met at Berkeley. Still, something dark lurked under the surface. As he entered adolescence. He noticed that something felt wrong about the way he got along with others and some of the thoughts in his head. Holmes started to keep to himself more. Around sixth grade, he heard noises hammering on his walls at night. He started to think about killing people, and over the next few years those thoughts and fantasies became more and more specific. He would see particular people dying, or see things that he described as nuclear winter or atomic bombs. He sometimes would even see saws cutting off people's heads. By high school, Holmes began to think he might be crazy, but he wanted to understand why to try to fix his broken mind. He believed there was something wrong with him, but still in high school he did very well. He easily got into college on a scholarship. Holmes continue to excel in college. At the University of California at Riverside, he was a dean's fellow. He graduated with honors in a nearly perfect four point o g p A. He was accepted into the neuroscience graduate program at the University of Colorado, and in twleven, just a year before the shooting, he packed his white hun day then headed eastward. It's the Rocky Mountains. He did very well for the first six months or so of grad school. The professors there and elsewhere will tell you that being a little eccentric isn't a bad thing for graduate students, particularly in sciences. They didn't mind the fact that he was a little odd because most of the other grad students were a little odd too, and Holmes did things that perfectly normal grad students do. On Valentine's Day, a mere five months before the shooting, he made his girlfriend a candle at chicken dinner at his apartment. They watched Netflix and eight ice cream. But underneath holmes Is broken brain was getting worse he was behind on his studies left the laboratory early. He started to see things at night, shadows that weren't there. In addition to his schooling, which he continued and continued to pass, James thought more and more about ways to kill people and began to plan specific ways to kill them. He called this his mission, and the mission was to kill as many people as possible so that he could collect their points. Homes called those points human capital. His delusion is a very strange one. It's hard to even to know how to describe it exactly. Richard Bonnie is a professor of law and of medicine at the University of Virginia. He became increasingly preoccupied with the idea that his worth as a human being could somehow be increased if he would kill other people, and he thought killing other people might lessen his depression and suicidal thoughts. Again, William read, he told me that it was about a fifty fifty chance, so he was willing to kill others on the chance of feeling a bit better himself. But so far it was just feelings and talk. Home sought help and is referred to a psychiatrist named Lynn Fenton at the student mental health clinic. In March, he told Dr Fitton about his thoughts of killing, but withheld his views on human capital and denied he had any specific targets or plans to kill. Based on what she heard and the fact that Holmes had no history of violence, Vinton prescribed him medication for anxiety and depression and scheduled a future appointment. Almost everyone that I talked with or that I read about, wonders why in the world nobody put James Holmes in the hospital. Uh, the reason is quite clear. Our laws are civil rights laws, and mental health laws in every state make it very difficult to take away a person's right to walk around to hospitalize them against their will. Meanwhile, Holmes's outward life started to match the chaos of his inward life. His girlfriend left him, he failed his second year exams, and he dropped out of grad school. Over the next few weeks, James Holmes hurtled toward disaster and the moment he would change thousands of lives. By June, his mission to kill as many people as possible consumed most of his time. He picked a target for his assault, a location designed to maximize his kills. He began to purchase weapons, ammunition and armor, and then one warm evening in July, it was time to execute his mission. And finally he brought together all of his body armor and ballistic clothing, his weapons, which included an m M P fifteen rifle which is much like an a R fifteen semi automatic rifle, a shotgun to block handguns, and a great deal of ammunition. And then he got in his car and drove without incident, over to the theater. Up next the trial of James Holmes. The Aurora gunman was clearly disturbed, but would it be enough for him to be deemed legally insane. When it's time to make a hire for your small business, naturally you want to find the best person for the job. Odds are that person is on LinkedIn. Here at Aussie where we weave each season of the thread, we depend on LinkedIn jobs to help us find the right person for our hiring needs to put top talent at our fingertips. LinkedIn jobs makes it easy to get matched with quality candidates who make the most sense for your position. It goes beyond the resume, using knowledge of both hard skills and soft skills to match you with the people who fit your business the best. Your LinkedIn jobs matches are based not just on skills and background, but also on interest, activities and passions. Matching lets you quickly get a group of the most relevant, qualified candidates. That way you can focus on the candidates you want to spend time talking to and make a quality higher. You're excited about Post a job today at LinkedIn dot com slash thread and get fifty dollars off your first job post that's LinkedIn dot com slash thread. Terms and conditions apply. A disturbing story that has been sealed away in court for three years came pouring out today. This is the first day of the trial of James Holmes. Holmes. This trial in returned Aurora to the National Spotlight. Prosecution filed one hundred and sixty six criminal charges against Holmes, including twenty four counts of murder and one d and forty counts of attempted murder. The district attorney made it clear he would seek the death penalty for Holmes as heinous deeds. Four hundred people filed into a box like theater to be entertained, and one person came there to slaughter them. His name is James Egan Holmes, he tried to murder a theater full of people to make himself feel better. Homes sat at the defense table and a dress shirt and slacks, his hair trimmed short, and no longer died Orange. His lawyers from the Colorado State Public Defender's Office did not challenge that their client had committed the atrocity. What the case really came down to, they said, was what was going on in his mind. There will be no doubt in your minds by the end of this trial that Mr Holmes is severely mentally ill. None. Why was holmes a state of mind so important the insanity defense. Most crimes aren't actually crimes under the law unless the defendant intends to do something criminal. Criminal intent is required to commit a crime. Yet there's no criminal intent, there's no crime. Andrea Alden is author of Disorder in the Court, Morality Myth, and the Insanity Defense. For as long as we've had civilizations with law, systems of law and place, there has been some sort of understanding that certain people don't understand the law due to some sort of meant defect. A recognition of this fact, of the importance of understanding the law when it comes to guilt is widespread. In the days of the Roman Empire, defendants were sometimes found not guilty because they were noncompassmentous, meaning without mastery of mind. William Read again. Some version of an insanity defense has been around for centuries, even for thousands of years. The Jewish Torah and Talmud speak of not holding people responsible for things that they do when they're out of their head. The process, if you look at it carefully, is perfectly reasonable. We don't convict four year olds of murder if they find a gun and accidentally shoot their playmate. Richard Bonnie again a legal scholar who has written extensively about the insanity defense. So I think that basic intuition is that it's not fair right to blame someone when their capacity to choose to do the right thing has been fundamentally undermined, you know, by a psychotic process over which they have, you know, no control. In other words, the subjective reality of defendants like James Holmes matters. The psychiatric idea here is that as the person becomes increasingly focused and driven by something that's not true but is what they believe to be true, and they become you know, detached, from the reality of what they are doing. They are also becoming detached from the moral reality you know, of what they are doing. But how do we tell when someone like James Holmes is sufficiently detached from reality to lack criminal intent? How do we know if he is indeed insane? Keep in mind the insanity is a legal term, not a medical term. He would never be diagnosed by a psychiatrist as being insane. In other words, the legal concept of insanity is different from the medical or psychological concept of mental illness. William read again. In fact, most people who are mentally ill are quite responsible for their acts and quite competent to do various things like go to work and drive a car, and sign a contract, or or raise their kids. The point for the insanity defense is is there, as a result of significant mental illness, an absence of the ability two understand what one is doing, understand that it's wrong, and adhere to the to the right if you will. Legal insanity in most jurisdictions boils down to this question, did the accused understand the difference between right and wrong at the time they committed the crime. It's a simple question, the one that has proven almost impossible at times for lawyers, judges, juries, and even psychiatrists answer. The case of James Holmes was no different. Could listening make you a better parent, a better leader, even a better person? Could listening inspire you to start something new? There's never been a better time to start listening on Audible. Audible has the largest selection of audio books on the planet. With Audible, you get access to an unbeatable selection of audio books, including best sellers, mysteries, thrillers, memoirs, and more. For listeners of The Thread who love history, I recommend you go to Audible and pick up Bearing the Cross, David Garrow's Pulitzer Prize winning biography of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. In Season three of The Thread, about the history of non violent protests, we drew a lot from Garo and his work on Dr. King. Audible members can choose three titles every month, one audio book and two Audible originals. You can't hear anywhere else, listen on any device, any time, any where, at home, at the gym, on your commute, or just on the go. Audible the most inspiring minds, the most compelling stories, the best place to listen. Get started with a thirty day trial. When you go to audible dot com slash thread or text thread to five hundred, that's audible dot com slash thread or text thread to five five hundred and listen for a change. The mystery of any insanity defense trial is what was happening in the defendant's mind at the time that he committed the crime for for for which he's being tried. This is Lincoln Kaplan, a senior research scholar at Yale Law School and an expert on the insanity defense. And you can't get inside someone's head uh in in the way you could if if we were machines and we had tape recorders for brains. The trial of James Holmes provides a recent and powerful example of the challenges of climbing inside a defendant's brain and some of the evidence that can be used to decide whether they knew the difference between right and wrong. The prosecution set out to show that Holmes knew exactly what he was doing. First, his lengthy preparations for the slaughter did not seem to be the actions of a man who was out of his mind. Homes stockpiled firearms, and thousands of rounds of ammunition at his apartment. For weeks, he practiced shooting at firing ranges he read up about explosives. Holmes also took disturbing selfies of himself. In one taken just days before the shooting, Holmes with his hair dyed bright orange red, where his black contact lenses and grins diabolically into the camera like a comic book villain. The prosecution also pointed out another key piece of evidence. The public got a first look today at a key piece of evidence and James holmes murder trial, a notebook The defense hopefuill help prove he was legally insane when he opened fire in a Colorado movie theater. Holmes mailed the spiral bound notebook to his psychiatrist, Dr. Finnon just hours before the shooting. It contained about thirty pages of often disjointed writings and illustrations. William read again. Some of the things he wrote look crazy. Some of the things he wrote looked like plans for the shooting. Some of the things he wrote looked like philosophy and thoughts about life, including his own life. Homes spelled out his theories of human capital using logic, math, and stick figure drawings. He called it insights into the mind of madness. He tried to diagnose his own mental illness and admitted he was powerless to fix it. He wrote, so anyways, that is my mind. It is broken. Neuroscience seemed like the way to go, but it didn't pan out. In order to rehabilitate the broken mind, my soul must be eviscerated. One of the things that was in the notebook that was very interesting was evidence that he considered a number of different ways to kill a lot of people a number of different venues in including but not limited to movie theaters. Evidence that he cased the cinema in Aurora carefully to find out which of the auditoriums would be the best one in which to commit the killings. The prosecution emphasized how Holmes used the notebook to plan his attack. Defense lawyers, on the other hand, argued it was proof of just how extensive holmes As delusions were. So looking at the notebook gives us a little bit of a window into how he was thinking or believing at a certain time, but it really doesn't describe Holmes in any accurate or consistent way. One cannot look in my opinion at that notebook and say, oh, here's a person with a severe mental illness such as schizophrenia. The evidence was inconclusive on the subject of Holmes as state of mind, and like so many insanity defense cases, it came down to the insights of expert psychiatric witnesses. Andrea Alden, in order for you to use your mental illness as a mitigating factor in a criminal defense, you're obviously having to talk about your mental illness in a legal setting, and then you're also going to need medical experts or psychiatrists or psychologists to come in and testify on your behalf. There were four such experts in the Holmes case. Each agreed that Holmes was delusional, and then his behavior was traceable to his mental illness. Richard Bonnie, So in that particular case is it's often the case you you have fun, you know, basic agreement about the seriousness of the mental illness and about the psychotic process that's going on. But what there may be some disagreement about is what the degree of detachment you know, from reality. Was the first three experts, one for the prosecution, one for the defense, and one court appointed deadlocked about homes of psychosis. So the judge appointed a fourth highly regarded expert to help. Dr William Reid, who you've been hearing from this episode. I went to Colorado and interviewed Holmes at the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo six times, and a couple of weeks later interviewed him three times at the jail in Aurora. So I spent almost twenty four hours with Holmes over time, all videoed so that there's no question of what I said, what he said, what he looked like. The video of those interviews was played for the jury on a television screen in the Arapahoe County courtroom for the jury. The video is a brief look inside the mind of the alleged killer, taken during a mental evaluation to help determine whether Holmes was legally insane when he opened fire in a Colorado movie theater. Holmes appears calm in the video. He speaks in a monotone voice, but he seems to understand the questions being asked by Dr. Read How did it feel to me, I'm really doing it gileration or known caution? Pretty aware of what was around. Um, yeah, I can see people trying to leave and sitting down on the sea, William Read again. My diagnostic impression was that he had something with in the profession call excuse a type of personality that's a serious mental illness, but not one in which people are routinely psychotic, that is, lose lose contact with reality. And I did not believe that he had lost contact with reality. At the time of the shootings. Read believed Holmes of mentally ill, but he did not think his illness prevented him from having criminal intent, from knowing the difference between right and wrong. Holmes planned everything that he did. He planned it very carefully. He practiced it. He planned a diversion, He planned ways to get away, although he didn't try to get away. He told me and he told other people that he was aware that his victims would not have wanted to die, would not have wanted to be shot. Holmes knew the killings were legal and wrong. He knew law enforcement would try to stop him if they discovered his plans. Holmes carried out his mission deliberately and with knowledge of the consequences. We believed that, in spite of his serious mental illness, that illness did not remove his legal sanity for purposes of being tried for a crime. The Colorado jury agreed. After deliberating for just twelve hours, they found Homes guilty of one hundred and sixty counts of murder and attempted murder. He was sentenced to more than three thousand years in prison, the longest sentence in American history. A single holdout juror was all that kept Homes from getting the death penalty. The judge's final words as he closed the trial were, Sheriff, get the in and out of my courtroom. Please. Cheers erupted as Holmes was led off to jail. The sentencing of James Holmes brought some closure to the victims of the Aurora shooting in their families, and he deserved to be held accountable for his crimes. Still, says William Reid, he would not have committed them if he did not suffer from a broken mind, if he were not mentally ill. How in the world can someone who kills twelve people and injures another fifty eight and leaves a terrible tragedy in a theater at midnight, How in the world can that person be viewed as sane in any reasonable sense? Part of that determination comes down to appearances and the impression made upon a jury. Holmes had bright orange hair and wild eyes, and his initial public appearances he looked like a madman. But he looked like a very different person three years later when he sat in the courtroom in a nice shirt and glasses. Andrea Alden one of the problems with understanding mental illness, particularly for lay people, for jurors, for judges um is that if you don't conform to the physical outward appearance of what we think quote unquote crazy should look like, then we cannot accept that you might be so mentally ill that you committed this crime as a result of your mental illness and not just because you were a bad person. The prosecution argued, Homes knew the difference between right and law, which is the standard for insanity under Colorado law. But it's just knowing that your actions are against the rules enough to be deemed sane. Did that make homes more bad than he was? Mad? Richard Bonny, So he had a grip, you know, at some level, on the reality, on the moral reality and the legal reality of the criminal reality of his conduct. What he might not have been sufficiently in touch with reality is to know in a deeper sense, to appreciate the moral enormity of what he was doing. And somehow the more delusional he got, the more you know the moral interests and the human interest and the human connection of the people who would be his victims, you know, the less that meant to him. The James Holmes case showed us how hard it is even for a severely mentally ill defendant to win with an insanity defense today. But to better understand why that is the case and how the insanity defense has evolved through time, we need to travel back through time to the first major case to address legal insanity, back all the way to another James James Hadfield, that British soldier who tried to kill the king back in eighteen hundred. Our journey back to James Hadfield will take us through some of the most compelling and horrifying criminal cases in history, cases that push the bounds of public opinion, scientific understanding, and the law. Up next episode two of this season's thread on the insanity defense will consider a case from the early nineteen nineties. One of the reasons that defendants like Jane Holmes have a tough time proving legal insanity today was the public outcry that followed earlier high profile cases, cases in which defendants who had committed shocking crimes were found not guilty by reason of insanity. One of those defendants was the rain of Bobbitt. She went to the kitchen, she sees a knife, she grabs it. Um, she goes back into the bedroom, and you know the rest of sort of history. She cuts off his penis while he is asleep. What Lorraina Bobbitt did to her sleeping husband, John Wayne Bobbitt captivated the country, and it revealed a public divided over issues like domestic violence and sexual assault, one more willing to laugh at an inexplicable tragedy than to face up to it, but to see it on the news. What happened to him? Very funny really, And when it came to Lorraina Bobbitt's insanity defense at trial, it revealed something else that what looks like justice may have little relation ship to the law. Um Threat is produced by Robert Coolo, Sophia Perpetua, and me Sean braswell. Chris Hoff engineered our show. This episode features Out and Vargas with a song called Back to insanity. To learn more about the thread, visit ausi dot com. Slash the thread all one word, and make sure to subscribe to the thread on Apple podcasts, follow us on I Heart Radio, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Check us out at ausi dot com or on Twitter and Facebook. If you love surprising, engaging stories from history, look no further than the flashback section of ausi dot com. That's o z y dot com. You love me, m let me the note which wait to

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