PERRY: Dodging the death penalty in the Aurora theater shooting trial is a community reprieve

The rush of vindication never came last week when Arapahoe County Judge Carlos Samour Jr. revealed the dramatic end to the Aurora theater trial, announcing that the death penalty in the case had been rebuffed.

I’d waited for more than two years to say, again, what a colossal waste and hardship the trial would be. That because of James Holmes’ obvious mental illness, it would be almost impossible to find an Aurora jury that would agree to execute him, and that the trial would come at an enormous financial and emotional cost to victims and the community.

I expected to be proven right that after so much heartache, Holmes would go to prison for the rest of his life, a deal defense attorneys offered not long after the horrific massacre occurred.

I’m still adamant that the trial was an enormous theatrical spectacle created by both the defense and the prosecution.

District Attorney George Brauchler’s prosecution team created a savvy case that was gratuitous, bordering on obscene in its brilliantly strategic effort to horrify the jury into reacting emotionally when deciding the death sentence. And the defense clearly worked to create a defendant that was beyond recognition, intellectually burned out by a ravenous insanity that eluded only expert psychiatrists.

Reality turned out to be so much more indifferent.

Despite the theatrics, Holmes himself wasn’t horrifying. The horror was created by the place and method of his crime. The horror came from the quick and lethal guns he brought into a dark, crowded public place. Holmes himself was cowardly and pathetic. He was smart and wholly unlikeable, probably even by his own family. They couldn’t be bothered to personally check on him even after so many worrisome signs and warnings made it clear things were not good.

The prosecution paraded victims onto the stand to recount the shocking and gut-wrenching accounts of their terror that night, working to equally horrify the jury to counter testimony about how obvious it was that Holmes is a critically sick and disturbed man. Brauchler’s team had to counter the notion that in Colorado, we don’t, in theory, execute mentally ill or mentally disabled people. Despite what Brauchler’s prosecution case insisted, Holmes’ mental illness never excused his evil crime — it simply helped to explain it.

Not I nor anyone hoped that Holmes would avoid punishment for his atrocities. But muddying the case with the unsolvable problems of the death penalty meant the truth would be obscured by the courtroom hyperbole used to win a verdict, not unravel the tragedy.

Numerous supporters of Brauchler say that so much would never had been revealed had the stakes not been so high in the trial. Likewise, Brauchler maintains that without the power of a death penalty in murder cases, he and other prosecutors would be unable to use the threat of execution as tool to exact as much non-lethal punishment as possible from criminals. And that’s who Brauchler and many others want us to be? Are we a society that puts on some kind of courtroom kabuki to win a judgment like it was an episode of “America’s Got Talent”? Outside the world of Dick Cheney, there are no circumstances where it’s OK to threaten to kill someone as a tool of coercion. That’s torture.

Every one of the family members of the shooting victims agreed that no verdict or punishment could bring back their slain loved ones or make the maimed ones whole again. We can inflict punishments against people like Holmes, but justice does not bring back the dead or diminish the agonizing heartache surrounding their loss.

Brauchler’s case against Holmes was impressive and thorough. He made arguments that were emotionally inciting. They worked hand in hand with the idea that the ultimate crime could only be answered with the ultimate punishment. His case was nearly successful because it played to those who say they “believe” in the death penalty because they aren’t the ones having to do the killing during the execution. Yeah, talk all you want about “I could” kill someone like Holmes for what he did. The reality is, you probably couldn’t, and that’s a good thing because if weren’t true, this would be a horrible place to live.

The only compelling argument I’ve heard for having held this trial came from the heartbroken father of slain victim Alex Sullivan. Tom Sullivan, Alex’s father, wrote this week that had the trial not gone on, he would likely have been in the dark about so many details surrounding his son’s death at the hands of Holmes. He would never have known amazing people forever bonded together by the crime, who otherwise would still be strangers.

Enduring a system of barbaric executions so that we can extract information about crime scenes or coerce people into suitable punishments is just wrong. It’s sick. It drags us down to the level of the criminals like Holmes. Our “belief” in the death penalty can’t excuse the mistakes we make trying to impose it. They can only explain it.

Contact @EditorDavePerry on Facebook and Twitter. Email him at dperry@aurorasentinel.com.