Holmes found guilty of first-degree murder exactly three years after gun attack that killed 12 people and injured 70 at a midnight film screening

James Holmes was on Thursday found guilty of the first-degree murder of 12 people during a midnight screening of the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises in 2012.

The guilty ruling means that the trial now enters the sentencing phase, where jurors will decide Holmes’s fate. Prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty, which has only been carried out once in Colorado in the past 38 years.

Family members of the victims wept as Judge Carlos Samour Jr read the verdict Thursday afternoon. Tissue boxes were scattered throughout the courtroom.

Holmes, dressed in a striped blue shirt, stood and stared silently ahead as he listened to the ruling.

Jurors sat quietly in the jury box as they passed a large stack of manila folders containing the verdicts to the judge. Due to the volume of charges, Samour sifted through the verdicts for 180 excruciating seconds as Holmes and the victims’ families waited to hear his fate. For over an hour, he read each of the charges individually, repeating over and over: “guilty”.

The jury reached its verdict after just 13 hours of deliberation.

When the judge found Holmes guilty of the attempted murder of Josh Nolan, the victim, sitting 30ft away, closed his eyes and nodded.

The jury reduced five of the attempted murder charges from first-degree to second-degree.

The verdict came down nearly three years to the day after the massacre in the movie theater took place. The trial lasted 11 weeks and featured 256 witnesses as well as thousands of pieces of evidence.

The jury, composed of nine women and three men, received the completed case on Tuesday evening after closing arguments wrapped up. They began deliberations the following morning.

Holmes had faced 165 separate charges: two charges of first-degree murder for each of his deceased victims, two charges of attempted murder for each of the victims he wounded, and one charge of explosives possession.

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The defense lawyers never denied that Holmes carried out the brutal cinema rampage, but argued instead that the then 24-year-old was legally insane at the time and thus was not culpable for his actions. They argued that he was driven by his belief in a theory called “human capital”, whereby killing others increased his own self-worth.

“Mental illness caused this to happen. Only the mental illness caused this and nothing else,” Holmes’s public defender, Dan King, said in closing arguments.

Prosecutors, led by district attorney George Brauchler, argued vehemently that Holmes might indeed have suffered from mental illness in the past, but well understood his actions when he prepared for and carried out his massacre. Brauchler pointed to Holmes amassing his arsenal over the course of many weeks and repeatedly discussing killing people online and in counseling.

In Colorado, the burden of proof of a defendant’s mental illness in cases with an insanity plea rests with the prosecution. That side’s argument was buttressed by the fact that the court’s two appointed forensic psychiatrists, William Reid and Jeff Metzner, both declared that while Holmes suffered from mental illness, he knew enough to be judged legally sane at the time of the shooting.

During the trial, prosecutors relied on emotionally jarring video, audio and testimony from survivors to make their case. They wrapped up their case by putting one of the victims, Ashley Moser, on the stand. Moser was pregnant before the shooting, but was left paralyzed and suffered a miscarriage. It wasn’t until days later that doctors informed Moser that her six-year-old daughter, Veronica Moser-Sullivan, who was at the movie theater with her, was killed in the rampage. “I was told that she didn’t make it,” Moser testified in June. “That she had passed away.”

The trial, which began on 27 April, was presided over by Judge Carlos Samour Jr. Nine thousand jury summonses were originally issued, the largest number ever sent for a single trial in US history. The judge said last November: “The court has decided to summon 9,000 prospective jurors instead of 6,000. It will be much easier to call off prospective jurors who are not needed than it will be to adjust if there are insufficient prospective jurors.”

Before the trial began, Holmes had offered to plead guilty if prosecutors agreed to forgo the death penalty. That offer was rejected.