The path to providing a fair trial to criminal suspects and balancing that against the critical demands of an open justice system accountable to the public is long and tortuous. The court and lawyers on both sides of James Holmes’ murder trial have all gone off the road.
One of the most important parts of the American justice system is ensuring that it operate under public scrutiny. It’s that unparalleled openness that sets American justice apart from every other court system in the world.
Arapahoe County District Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr., and especially lawyers defending and prosecuting the man who has admitted to the July 20, 2012, Aurora theater massacre have lost sight of that.
Samour on Dec. 20 ruled against media outlet motions to ensure that upcoming hearings on Holmes’ sanity evaluations be held in open court. In a brilliant flash of error, Samour said that allowing the public to hear arguments why an additional sanity evaluation should or should not be ordered for Holmes would “infect a large portion of the jury pool with factual information” about whether Holmes has been deemed insane and likely rob him of a fair trial.
Nothing sends out red flags like when a murder trial judge is worried about “factual information” going public.
Defense attorneys agree with Samour, but for a different reason. In a motion demanding he keep upcoming hearings on Holmes’ sanity closed, they said that the “only role the public or the media is likely to play if allowed access to this hearing is to seek out attention-grabbing headlines based on evidence that may ultimately not be admissible or admitted at trial.”
Here’s the reality of what’s happening. Defense attorneys are far less interested in ensuring Holmes’ get a “fair trial” than they are in ensuring that they win the case against their client. Their perception is that any pretrial publicity makes their job harder, and so they have and will work to keep as many details of this case secret.
Same goes for the prosecution, which has doubled down on Holmes’ future by adding the death penalty to the mix, creating something much larger and unwieldy than just a tragic murder trial. The stakes now are so high that Holmes’ permanent conviction at all costs is clearly driving the show. Prosecutors forget that justice isn’t for Holmes, the case or themselves, it’s for the victims, which include all of us in the Aurora community.
What everyone involved in this case, and so many more, have lost sight of is a “fair trial.” What’s fair is ensuring that prosecutors share evidence against a suspect in advance of a trial, and that lawyers have a chance during jury selection to find jurors who will consider the evidence before them, setting aside any prejudices they bring into the courtroom. In striving for that, too many courts, and this one especially, have tortured logic and contrivance past the point of diminished returns.
A potential juror discovering in the newspaper that the psychiatrist charged with evaluating Holmes thinks he’s insane will have the same affect on that juror when he learns it in the jury box. Given the logic of Samour’s ruling, every time an objection to testimony or evidence is sustained during the trial, the jury must be replaced because its judgment was influenced and tainted by inadmissible material.
The jury system is imperfect at its best because people are imperfect at their best. But this and previous secrecy requests and rulings are cynical and disingenuous contrivances that deny the fact that people are capable of making fair and rational decisions on their own.
Nothing about this trial is as critical as is information about Holmes’ psychiatric condition given that a plea bargain may well be the most prudent and fair route to justice. By closing these next hearings, Samour moves that decision into the back room and away from public scrutiny. Allowing the public to understand as much as possible about Holmes’ state of mind only makes it easier keep everyone on the road to a fair trial and justice. Right now, those in charge of this trial are lost.