Posted on 07/26/2012 5:06:34 AM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
For most of his 24 years, James Holmes seemed to be doing everything right.
He worked for a summer as a counselor at a camp for needy kids, guiding them through activities designed to teach empathy, compassion and good citizenship. Another summer, he snagged a prestigious internship at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
He attended church with his family in their quiet, upper-middle-class San Diego neighborhood, listening to his sister play bass in the worship band. He breezed through high school and college, taking a strong interest in science and graduating with honors from the University of California, Riverside.
Friends and acquaintances of Holmes say they had no inkling that anything was awry with him --
"It's absurd. It's so out of character for this young man," said Jerry Borgie, senior pastor at Penasquitos Lutheran Church in San Diego, where the Holmes family worshipped. "James had goals. He was going to succeed."
But a few hints have emerged in recent days that Holmes may have struggled far more than those around him realized.
His summer internship at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, in 2006 might have been impressive on paper, but...
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Well,at least you've got that half right.Have you ever seen the brain of a schizophrenic sitting right next to one belonging to a normal person? I have.Big,big,*big* difference.I've also seen a side by side comparison of the brain scans of a schizophrenic and a "normal" person.Huge difference.These are just two of the thousands of experiences regarding schizophrenia that 20 years at a very famous teaching hospital afforded me.Graduate from medical school...or at least have the same type of experiences as I've had...and we'll talk.
crack babies do not grow up to be neuroscientists. However children of schitzopherenics do and can.
Reminds me a bit of the after-the-fact profile that was published of the 2007 Virginia Tech student.
I'll certainly accept you as a legal expert and,given your experience,accept yours as a potential outcome here.I,a rank amateur regarding the law,believe that not everything that's legal is moral.If,by some chance,my "diagnosis" is correct then the laws,as currently written,may deem him to be culpable to some degree but I'd be very reluctant to deem him to be "morally" guilty.Perhaps he needs to spend the rest of his life in a psych hospital but very possibly not in a prison.
my jaw dropped.
I didn’t expect to see her here.
neuroscience should be banned.
Thanx .. I don’t know the specifics, but this is sure to take a little attention off of the incompetent usurper bastard in Washington DC... and the other 56 states
It’s always made sense to me that a criminal must have opportunity, means and motive. What is missing here is motive, which suggests the possibility of insanity to me.
It would take far too long to go into detail but at the big city ER in which I worked for 20 years we had a "regular" (big city ER's have *many* such patients) who was from a very wealthy family who was a serious,and chronic,schizophrenic.He wandered the streets,begged for money,was routinely dirty, disheveled and desperately confused.Very sad indeed.I met his parents once and heard them speak of just how helpless they were regarding their son given the laws regarding involuntary hospitalization,legal guardianship,etc.They seemed very sincere to me.
Why?
IMHO I kind of side with the mom on the argument of the phone call issue. They called her extremely early and described her son and I could easily see her asking “you have the right one?” OR maybe they were just describing him to her and didn’t tell her He was the suspected shooter, and she was just saying “you have the right one” about the identity verification. Not realizing he was the shooter.
People really want to pretend that the brain isn’t a physical object that can have structural or chemical flaws that affect behavior - I think it’s anxiety over “free will.”
I honestly think there are more people that believe in demonic posession on FR than that believe it’s possible for there to be chemically, structurally, or genetically based mental illness.
A little sad since it is the year 2012, not the year 1012, the last time I checked.
You have hit upon the philosophical justification for the insanity defense: if a person is so mentally screwed up that they cannot even understand that what they are doing is wrong, then there is no justification in punishing them. However, if there is a basis to find that they could appreciate that shooting patrons of a movie theater is wrong, then they cannot evade the criminal consequences.
Your post caused me to check Colorado’s statutes regarding insanity. I practice in Indiana, and Colorado has very different statutes. The test for insanity in Colorado is phrased differently, but it is the same test: “unable to appreciate right from wrong.” The procedure is much different. In Indiana, once insanity has been raised as a defense, the defendant has the burden to prove they are insane by a preponderance of the evidence. Under Colorado law, the Court appoints psychiatrists to examine the defendant, and then determines from their reports whether the defendant is permitted to raise the defense at trial. If the Court permits the defense, the State must then prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is sane. From a legal perspective, the prosecutor in Colorado has a more difficult time than he would in Indiana.
The result of a trial where insanity is raised as a defense is “all or nothing.” If he’s found guilty, he’s sentenced, but if there is a certifiable mental disorder, he must be given psychiatric treatment. If found not responsible by reason of insanity (it’s not “not guilty,” it’s “not responsible”), then he’s committed to the mental health agency for regular mental commitment proceedings. Indiana offers a jury the middle ground of finding someone “Guilty but Mentally Ill,” which is still guilty but the Court must take mental illness into account as a reason to reduce a sentence, and the person must receive mental health treatment.
Having said all that, juries (at least those composed of regular folks, not whack jobs) do not like the insanity defense. As a practical matter, despite what the Colorado criminal code says, a defense lawyer pushing an insanity defense will have to show a long history of documented diagnoses of mental illness, and not just a client who acts goofy after killing a lot of people.
If I were prosecuting this case in Colorado, there is one salient fact that I would pound relentlessly: the guns in the car outside the exit door. If the guy could not appreciate that what he was doing was wrong, he would have tried to take all the guns into the theater past the ticket window and ticket taker, with no attempt at concealment. The fact that he had to conceal the guns outside an exit door shows he had a minimal understanding of the wrongfulness of his conduct, and that also shows that his thinking was not so disordered that he could not concoct a plan to get around the question of “how do I get my arsenal into the theater?”
When he finally reached a level where those in charge cared more about the quality of his work (or the reputation of their institution), it became obvious to him that, for all his supposed "genius," he wasn't even near the middle of this one program.
I think it's pretty common for bright kids to get to college, coming from a high school where they may have been able to recognize themselves as the "smartest" kid in the class, and find they're just one of many.
And with the recognition that no matter how "smart" you think you are, all that matters is the work you put out, he likely saw people he felt superior to getting better results than he did, and he resented that and felt cheated by the world.
see post 34, especially the last paragraph. It is not necessary for the State to prove a motive to kill. It helps, but that’s not the key in an insanity case. It’s strictly a test of whether or not Holmes knew it was wrong.
The adoption part of this is interesting. Perhaps more details will come out.
Father worked for a company that had been involved with DARPA on a project involving the brain.
Grandfather was likely involved with some kind of intelligence.
Mass Killer involved with a grant studying the brain.
I think he either experimented on himself or was experimented on.
Don’t forget that the Unabomber was experimented by a Harvard professor that had been involved with the OSS.
It will be interesting to see the timeline between the time he went out of the theater and the time he started shooting.
He started shooting at 12:38.The movie started at 12:05(does that included trailers???). this according to ABC
I don’t think I have seen any reports of seeing a red haired clown guy in the theater but I may have missed them.
You can't imagine someone killing a bunch of people because they're pissed off?
How about the Happy Land Social Club killer? Did he kill 80 people because he was a schizophrenic or because he was mad as his girlfriend? Or because he was drunk?
I somewhat agree with you, though, that many here, on both sides, seem to have to have some deeply hidden explanation, either medical or spiritual, for this guy's behavior, just because "most" people wouldn't do this.
Maybe it's neither, and the guy was just a complete asshole who couldn't handle failure.
Schizophrenia is not comparable to hepatitis or congestive heart failure, which have physical symptoms that can be seen. Schizophrenia is not a disease of the brain. A brain tumor is a disease of the brain.
__________________
Schizophrenia tracks with changes in brain size and function.
Schizophrenia is not comparable to hepatitis or congestive heart failure, which have physical symptoms that can be seen. Schizophrenia is not a disease of the brain. A brain tumor is a disease of the brain.
__________________
Schizophrenia tracks with changes in brain size and function.
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