CENTENNIAL — James Holmes will not dispute that he killed 12 people and wounded 58 more with gunfire at the Century Aurora 16 movie theater last summer.

A judge Tuesday formally allowed Holmes to change his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity and ordered that Holmes undergo an intensive psychiatric evaluation.

“I find that Mr. Holmes understands the effects and consequences of the not guilty by reason of insanity plea,” Judge Carlos Samour said in accepting the plea.

An insanity plea is just short of an admission; the Colorado Supreme Court has ruled such pleas are “in the nature of confession and avoidance.” And the plea change allows Holmes’ lawyers to argue at trial that their client was so mentally ill at the time of the July 20 shootings that he could not tell right from wrong.

But the plea change came on the same day that newly released court filings provide an image of a legally cognizant Holmes in the hours after the shooting.

According to a defense motion filed Monday and made public Tuesday, Holmes asked for an attorney shortly after being taken to Aurora police headquarters following his capture outside the theater. As one detective read Holmes his rights, according to the motion, Holmes asked, “How do I get a lawyer?”

Holmes then told the detectives he wanted to “invoke the Sixth Amendment.”

“I want a court-appointed attorney,” he said a little later.

The motion was one of 89 that Holmes’ court-appointed defense attorneys filed Monday afternoon to meet a deadline for raising issues in the case not related to the death penalty. The motion argues that Holmes’ statements to investigators should be thrown out because detectives initially ignored Holmes’ pleas for a lawyer.

According to the motion, even after Holmes asked for an attorney, a detective persisted in asking Holmes, “Is there anyone else we need to be concerned about at the theaters?” A separate motion alleges that police kept lawyers from meeting with Holmes the day after the shootings.

Other motions seek to throw out statements Holmes made earlier to officers outside the theater and statements he made later to an FBI agent about explosives in his apartment. In total, four motions ask the judge to bar from trial statements Holmes made to authorities.

Another 11 motions seek to suppress almost all evidence detectives gathered related to Holmes — including items found in his apartment and his car, pictures discovered on his cellphone, e-mails and bank records. The motions argue the evidence was collected via illegal searches.

Among other motions filed Monday is one that says Holmes’ lawyers will ask the case to be tried in a different county than Arapahoe. “Mr. Holmes has a right to a fair trial by an impartial jury,” the motion states.

The motions and the plea change provide, for the first time, a clear road map for the case in the months ahead.

After Samour accepted Holmes’ insanity plea — when Samour asked Holmes if he had any questions about the consequences of the plea, Holmes spoke for only the second time during a court hearing, uttering a clear, prompt, “No” — Samour ordered that Holmes be committed to the Colorado Mental Health Institute in Pueblo for an independent psychiatric evaluation. Wearing a red jail jumpsuit with his hair combed back, Holmes appeared to follow along as the judge read him a five-page advisement about the consequences of an insanity plea. Defense attorney Daniel King turned the pages for him.

Before Holmes is sent to the hospital, the doctor doing the evaluation wants to read through much of the 40,000 pages of evidence in the case, prosecutor Rich Orman said. That is expected to take a month. The actual evaluation is expected to last at least another month, and Samour scheduled a hearing for August to see where things stand.

“I would like to be aggressive about keeping our trial date, if we can,” Samour said. The trial is scheduled to start in February.

Among the things the doctor will read is a notebook Holmes mailed to his University of Colorado psychiatrist just hours before the shooting. Holmes’ attorneys have long argued that the notebook is protected by doctor-patient confidentiality and it has sat for months in a sealed envelope inside a court clerk’s office. But Samour ruled Tuesday that Holmes’ insanity plea waived that privilege, and he allowed prosecutors — and the state psychiatrist — to view what could be a critical piece of evidence about Holmes’ mental state prior to the shootings.

While the examination at the state Mental Health Institute takes place, lawyers in the case will be kept busy arguing over the newly filed motions.

Prosecutors have a July 3 deadline to file responses to the motions, and defense attorneys have until July 17 to reply to those responses. A month’s worth of motion hearings are scheduled to begin in August.

Though it is tedious progress, theater shooting survivor Marcus Weaver said outside the courthouse Tuesday that victims of the shooting have accepted the case will be drawn out.

“Do I think he’s insane? Absolutely not,” Weaver said. “And I think in the end when all the evidence is brought out and the dust settles, it will be the same result as if he did a not-guilty plea.”

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

About the insanity plea

To be found not guilty by reason of insanity, defendants must show three things: (1) That they had a mental disease or defect that (2) impacted their judgment to a degree that (3) they could not tell right from wrong. Colorado law says such mental illness is not the same thing as “moral obliquity, mental depravity, or passion growing out of anger, revenge, hatred, or other motives or kindred evil conditions.” When evidence of insanity is introduced, prosecutors must prove sanity beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that insanity pleas are “in the nature of confession and avoidance.” But they are not outright admissions of culpability. State law says, “The plea of not guilty by reason of insanity includes the plea of not guilty.” That means juries must decide both whether the defendant committed the crime and whether mental illness excuses the defendant from guilt — similar to how juries decide self-defense homicide cases.

Defendants found not guilty by reason of insanity are committed to a state psychiatric facility until they can show at a hearing that they no longer have “a mental condition which would be likely to cause him or her to be dangerous either to himself or herself or to others or to the community in the reasonably foreseeable future,” according to state law.