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| FILE - This file photo provided on Sept. 20, 2012 by the Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office shows James Holmes. Holmes, the suspect in a deadly movie theater attack in Colorado, threatened a professor before the shooting, leading the university to ban him from campus, prosecutors said in court documents released Friday, Sept. 28, 2012. |
DENVER (AP)
-- The suspect in the Aurora movie shooting case mailed "burnt
currency," along with a notebook, to his psychiatrist before the attack.
He threatened a professor and was banned from a university campus
before withdrawing from its neuroscience graduate program. His defense
team has added a psychiatrist.
Those were the
few tidbits of information in hundreds of pages of heavily-redacted
court documents released Friday, which serve as the best chance the
public has to understand what happened before James Holmes allegedly
opened fire at a midnight screening of the new Batman movie more than
two months ago.
The documents shed little
light on Holmes' possible motives or whether the university ignored
warning signs about him. That's partly because Arapahoe County District
Judge William B. Sylvester continued to keep under seal the key
documents in the case - the affidavit that lays out prosecutors' case
against Holmes, and the search warrants that allowed them to gather
evidence against him.
Holmes, 24, faces 152 charges in the July 20 shooting that killed 12 people and injured 58 others.
Some
of the documents are entirely blacked out. In others, Sylvester's
rulings on legal disputes, references to years-old case law and even
copies of newspaper articles are redacted, along with information about
the investigation.
The documents do shed a
little more light on one of the main disputes in the case - Holmes'
threats against a professor, possibly the university psychiatrist, Dr.
Lynne Fenton, who has testified that she contacted campus police after
her last meeting with Holmes June 11. Fenton, who testified Aug. 30,
said she went to police to gather more information and communicate her
"concern."
She did not refer to her concern as a threat.
Prosecutors
contended that Holmes was barred from campus after making the threats.
The University of Colorado has said that Holmes was denied access to
nonpublic buildings on campus because he withdrew as a neuroscience
graduate student, not for safety reasons.
A
university spokeswoman did not return a call for comment on Friday. The
university has previously refused to comment on how it handled Holmes,
citing a gag order that Sylvester imposed. Before the gag order,
university officials said their police force had no contact with Holmes
and that the chief of the department knew nothing about him.
The
defense team sought sanctions against prosecutors for contending Holmes
had been barred from campus, arguing that the false statements could
contaminate the jury pool. But Sylvester shot that down, ruling the
statements were within legal bounds.
Defense attorneys did not return a call for comment Friday.
The
most legally significant disclosure Friday was the inclusion of the
psychiatrist on Holmes' defense team. Holmes' attorneys have said he is
mentally ill.
"This is unusual in a normal
case, but not surprising in this case," said criminal trial lawyer Dan
Recht, former president of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar.
"Presumably he's (the psychiatrist) the one who is going to opine on
whether Holmes is insane or not.
"It's a foregone conclusion that the defense will plead not guilty by reason of insanity."
Other
documents likely contain new information, but are blacked out. For
example, in one pleading, attorneys describe how law enforcement handled
the package that Holmes sent Fenton, which was discovered four days
after the attack and also after Holmes allegedly booby-trapped his own
apartment.
Authorities were so worried the
package was also rigged that they X-rayed it and had a technician in a
protective suit open it. What investigators saw when they realized the
package was not dangerous, however, is redacted. All that is legible in
the documents is a reference to the package containing a notebook with a
post-it note and "burnt currency."
The
records also show that authorities obtained text messages that Holmes
sent a classmate. The documents do not say what those texts discussed.
In
court, prosecutors suggested Holmes was angry at the failure of a once
promising academic career and stockpiled weapons, ammunition, tear gas
grenades, and body armor as his research deteriorated and professors
urged him to get into another profession. Chief Deputy District Attorney
Karen Pearson said Holmes failed a key oral exam in June, was banned
from campus and began to voluntarily withdraw from the school.
Documents filed in the case from now on will be public, unless prosecutors or defense attorneys ask they not be released.
