So the curtain is drawn on the James Holmes theater massacre trial, and the final call on punishment is life without parole. With the death penalty off the table, appeals won't be in the offing, so there can be no higher court ruling on the death penalty as applied to someone mentally ill, and I bet lawyers on both sides of the aisle (and the probably 4-5er Supreme Court on this) are relieved.
Let's recall how we got here.
With the peculiar procedures of the Colorado system however, there was a further phase beyond this one, related to sentencing, in which the jury had to assess mitigating factors (Holmes' mental health) against aggravating factors (essentially the heinousness of the crime (now determined as such)), but again by a standard of reasonable doubt whether the latter were impugned by the former as to take the death penalty off the table. The jury said no--there was no reasonable doubt that the mitigating factors impugned the aggravating factors. If the jury decided otherwise, the trial would have ended with life imprisonment (as I understand things).
So, ending today, the jury had one more decision (or decisions really on all counts of murder) to make--would Holmes receive the death penalty? As the individual decisions were read, the message was the same: "we do not have a unanimous sentencing verdict on this count" which resulted in a default life imprisonment without parole.
In my first post on this case I predicted guilt and the death penalty; as the trial proceeded and the guilty verdict came down, I revised that prediction in light of the jury's apparent mass-psychology of ignoring significant signs of mental illness to produce the guilty verdict, and that some jurors would assuage their consciences in sentencing; I was less confident of that in the next phase's finding, but today I guess my revised prediction was upheld.
But, now I can't figure out what some individual jurors were thinking moving from the next-to-last phase to this one. They previously had to unanimously reject mitigations over aggravations by the toughest legal standard--which they did. But now some of those same jurors had sufficient doubt to fail to endorse the death penalty as the proper punishment.
Since the legal implications of evaluating the status of mitigations over aggravations is about punishment, and the jury rejected that as a defense against the death penalty, then I guess I have one big question. What legally and morally justifies this final ruling on punishment, which, conveniently (for conscience?), results in a decision by failure to come to a decision that was to be expected as one approving the death penalty as signaled by their previous decision?
Look I'm no legal expert here, and certainly am willing to hear at least legal reconciliations of the results of these latter two phases of the punishment deliberations. But philosophically at least it seems to me that the jury is saying: (i) guilty though insane (but this should not be the result of the law at work here it seems), (ii) the actions are not mitigated beyond reasonable doubt to avoid the ultimate punishment, and (iii) yet the guilty party is not deserving of the ultimate punishment. Is there some moral principle in (iii) that trumps the legal principles invoked in (i) and (ii)? Is that it? Do juries in cases like this have that legal right to allow conscience to have the final say?
One of the beautiful things about our democratic jury system is the power it sometimes gives a group of citizens to work out tough ethical issues. I'm guessing the one holdout made a deal with the other 11 jurors to let it go to the final phase while s/he kept considering her vote, but also made it clear s/he was unlikely to vote for death and s/he voted for life because Holmes is clearly insane. Just a guess. Of course, the fact that jury's have such power also feeds into the arbitrary nature of the death penalty, which Breyer argues is now so bad it's one (more) reason capital punishment is cruel and unusual.
Meanwhile, I still want to know if Holmes' study of neuroscience influenced his beliefs or behaviors.
Posted by: Eddy Nahmias | 08/08/2015 at 04:43 PM
Thanks Eddy, I suspect your suggestion that there was an ongoing "deal" to take the process to the bitter end is right. It'll be interesting to see what juror interviews might reveal about all this in the next few weeks. And no doubt there'll be a pop-audience book or two out of all this. Maybe even something more serious, I'd hope.
Posted by: V. Alan White | 08/08/2015 at 06:27 PM