You know the dreams. Bizarre crap in your foggy head where you see yourself trying to catch falling bricks with a toilet brush and the sound of the clunking stones wakes you up enough to realize it’s really just your kid’s tennis shoes in the dryer leaking into your nap.
I was abruptly awakened from the nightmare of the James Holmes trial last week. The admitted Aurora theater shooter’s defense team has asked to move his Arapahoe County district court trial out of the Aurora area. Because of what attorneys say is, “incessant and unrelenting” media attention to the case, they don’t think Holmes can get a fair insanity trial.
This is the craziest dream ever. Unrelenting? Holmes admitted he compiled a horrifying arsenal of guns, ammo and bomb-making materials, and that he systematically planned one of the most heinous and terrorizing attacks on Americans to date, right here in our backyard. He sneaked through the back door of a packed movie theater, lobbed smoke bombs and started shooting into the crowd. He murdered 12 people. He wounded 72 more. He terrorized not only thousands here in Aurora but millions across the planet. His crime has made Aurora synonymous with getting murdered at the movies.
So Holmes’ defense team just thought this would blow over in the papers like an unsavory story about cat collecting? No wonder so many Americans have become so cynical about courts, lawyers and justice. Holmes’ defense team is twisting the American notion of a fair trial to do what the American court system does best: wear you down. The guarantee of fair trials is one of the most important parts of the American government. Fair means that juries, not a council of elders, consider capital crime and punishment. It means that your neighbors, not the police, decide your guilt. It means that the defense has a chance to pick among a large jury pool and discount potential jurors with immovable biases. Here in the Aurora area, Holmes’ lawyers have a half-million or so people to find jurors who will make a decision based on what comes out in court.
That’s fair. What’s unfair is the garish waking dream this trial and so many like it in this country have become. In a herculean effort to keep the state from injecting Holmes with lethal drugs as punishment for carrying out the Aurora massacre, defense lawyers have now enlisted the aid of a California company that specializes in manipulating the court system. They’ve agreed to write a fat check to Trial Innovations, a consultant that has Ph.D.s and lawyers for hire to aid in keeping the crazy dream alive in cases like the Aurora massacre. Bryan Edelman is the defense team’s expert witness trying to persuade the judge in this case that reader comments on our website and stories and editorials in our newspaper and others have made it so anyone within driving distance of Holmes’ Arapahoe County courtroom will all be bringing their own nooses to the jury selection process.
Edelman and his partners aren’t actually sympathetic to Holmes’ case here. He and Trial Innovations are equal opportunity opportunists. They make money by advising lawyers on both sides of the bench as to how to manipulate case outcomes by doing things like spelling out how much heiny-shining lawyers should inflict on jurors so they like them from day one. Criminal cases, civil cases, boring business disputes, Trial Innovations and hundreds of companies just like them are ready at a moment’s notice to step in to alter the process and run up the cost of a justice system so bloated, it makes U.S. health care look like a bargain.
Edleman noted to his client, who passed it along to Arapahoe County District Court Judge Carlos A. Samour Jr., that the massacre coverage in the Aurora Sentinel and Denver Post has made it impossible for the defense to find a dozen or so people who would entertain the idea that Holmes was insane when he pulled off one of the most ghastly crimes of the century.
Move it? Where? Don’t look toward Dallas. Or Oklahoma City. Or even Colorado Springs. The only thing jurors in those places would find crazy is that Holmes isn’t already working through the end of death-sentence appeals.
This has nothing to do with fairness. It has to do with winning, money and careers. A fair jury in the eyes of the defense and the prosecution is the one that will decide the case in their favor. Consultants find this all a lucrative and interesting way to make outstanding livings. And lawyers involved have political and legal careers on the line. Out here, a few thousand people are still imprisoned by the horror Holmes unleashed. We only want this bad dream to end.
Move the trial because it would be fair? No. That’s nearly as bizarre as were the shootings. We’re all dreaming.
Reach Dave Perry at dperry@aurorasentinel.com