CENTENNIAL — Defense attorneys in the Aurora theater shooting case argued Friday that court orders for the shooter’s e-mails were too broad to be valid.

Dan King, an attorney for James Holmes, suggested one order was so broadly written that it could be read as a demand for access to all e-mails on the popular Hotmail service. He said e-mails obtained from the orders shouldn’t be allowed as evidence at Holmes’ upcoming murder trial.

“So, in effect, this was a court order for Microsoft to produce all of its e-mails?” attorney Dan King asked Friday while questioning Aurora police detective Thomas Welton about a court order for Hotmail e-mails.

Welton shrugged off the question, saying he believed the order was clear and, regardless, Microsoft provided e-mails from only Holmes’ Hotmail account. Welton said the requests had to be written broadly — without a start or end date for the e-mails sought — because detectives were casting a wide net in gathering evidence against the man charged in one of the worst mass shootings in American history.

“At the time these were filed, I had no idea when this was planned,” Welton testified during Friday’s hearing. “I think it would have been an error on my part to pick a date.”

Friday’s hearing in the case was the fourth one this week in which defense attorneys argued that key pieces of information should be kept out of Holmes’ upcoming murder trial. In trying to exclude e-mails seized from Holmes’ Hotmail, Gmail and school accounts, defense attorneys returned to familiar arguments they used against other evidence earlier this week and during hearings last week. The attorneys argued that Holmes had a “reasonable expectation of privacy” for his e-mail accounts and that the court orders used to seize the e-mails were overly broad.

The orders are formally known as Production of Records orders and are similar to search warrants. Investigators draft a request for the orders, and a judge has to sign off on the request.

For the e-mail orders to be legally sufficient, defense attorneys argued that authorities needed to be more specific about what they were looking for and what they took — that prosecutors couldn’t just dig through everything. Prosecutors responded Friday that a big crime justified a big search, and they said a judge first looked over e-mails from Holmes’ school account before deciding what would be turned over to investigators.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against Holmes, who is charged with 166 counts of murder, attempted murder and other crimes in connection with the attack on the Century Aurora 16 movie theater that killed 12 and wounded dozens more. His trial is scheduled to begin in February.

Next week, attorneys will hold one more week of hearings for issues not related to the death penalty. The judge will release written rulings on the issues at later dates. Several more weeks of hearings — on issues related to the death penalty — are scheduled for December.

John Ingold: 303-954-1068, jingold@denverpost.com or twitter.com/john_ingold