By Gary G. Kohls, MD
And How the Aurora Massacre Could Have Been Prevented
The mass murder trial of confessed “Batman Shooter” James Holmes is almost over. The grossly ill-informed jury was somehow convinced by the prosecution that Holmes’s increasingly psychiatric drug-intoxicated brain and the resultant drug-induced insanity had nothing to do with the irrational mass murders at the Aurora, Colorado movie theater on July 20, 2012.
And now this same ill-informed jury, who rejected the insanity plea a couple of days ago, will decide whether or not this victim of Big Pharma and Big Psychiatry (and the tragic “misdiagnosis and over-medication roller-coaster” that he and millions of others in America are on) will either be put to death or imprisoned for life in a non-psychiatric hospital – without possibility of parole. How the most pertinent facts of the case – and the cause of his obvious insanity have been over-looked or willfully ignored by the legal and psychiatric professionals would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious. One doesn’t laugh at a comedy of errors.
It is highly possible that the most important details in the Batman Shooter trial have been willfully overlooked by the legal and psychiatric professionals involved in the case. Whether or not there is legal malpractice involved I will leave to ethical legal professionals, if any can be found; but a strong case can be made for psychiatric malpractice – or at least medical malfeasance – in the case of Holmes’s prescribing (University of Colorado health center) psychiatrist, Dr Lynne Felton. The possibility of either legal or medical malpractice by the involved professionals has not been raised by the journalists who have been breathlessly covering the emotionally-charged aspects of the case since the crime was committed exactly three years ago.
Tough on Crime Prosecution vs. Ill-informed Defense
The lead prosecuting attorney, District Attorney George Brauchler is, as is the norm for most politically motivated, tough-on-crime DA’s, going for the death penalty. The jury rejected the defense’s assertion that Holmes was insane at the time of the infamous shootings and should not be executed Anybody who saw the dazed and drugged look on Holmes’s face at his first hearing will know that he was intoxicated with some drug at the time. Brauchler was the individual who held back the identity of Holmes’s drugs for as long as he legally could. Apparently he even had possession of the pill bottles that had been taken from Holmes’s apartment, thus derailing the defense’s ability to plea insanity or to understand what had altered Holmes’s mind so drastically.
Holmes’s lead defense attorney was Dan King. As with all court appointed lawyers, King was a poorly-reimbursed court-appointed lawyer who never denied that Holmes was the shooter but he also never had the monetary resources to obtain a well-informed psychiatrist of the stature of Dr Peter Breggin, Dr David Healey or Dr Joseph Glenmullen to testify for the defense. He stated in his closing arguments that Holmes is/was schizophrenic, is therefore “not guilty by reason of insanity” (I prefer the phrase “guilty but insane”) and should not be executed. Holmes’s understandably distraught parents agreed.
King argued throughout the trial that Holmes was insane at the time of the shootings and should have been locked up in a long-term psychiatric facility rather than in a penitentiary, where, unfortunately, he would have been subject to the same “treatment” he received before his shooting rampage. He would have been under the care of prescribing psychiatrists with beliefs and prescribing habits similar to Dr Fenton.
It is common knowledge that virtually all American psychiatrists reflexively “treat” with psychotropic drugs over 95 – 98% of their out-patients (and 100% of their in-patients) in various combinations of neurotoxic and psychotoxic, brain-altering chemicals like Holmes’s sertraline (generic Zoloft {Pfizer}, which is known to cause homicidal impulses, suicidal impulses, agitation, mania, psychosis, etc) and the benzodiazepine clonazepam (generic Klonopin {Roche}, which acts on the same brain synapses that the violence-inducing drug alcohol does).
Either one of those two drugs could have easily caused Holmes’s intoxicated brain to become psychotic and homicidally insane. Fenton had prescribed them for Holmes for the past several months, resulting in a state of chronic inebriation which likely caused his decline from a brilliant neuroscience grad student (he graduated with a 3.94 GPA as an undergraduate) into a paranoid, zombified loner who failed an important oral final exam a few weeks before the killings. His failure caused him to drop out of school, a shameful failure in his eyes and the eyes of others. Intolerable shame induces acts of violence, particularly in the isolated, the drug-intoxicated and the hopeless.
In my research about this case (of court records, media reports or testimony from “expert witnesses”) I have found not the slightest hint of anybody’s awareness of what is commonly known about the cocktail of drugs that Dr Fenton had prescribed for Holmes. In addition to the sertraline and clonazepam, Fenton had also prescribed propranolol [generic Inderal, a “beta-blocker” drug which can cause depression and should be used with extreme caution with psychotropic drugs], drugs that Dr Fenton testified under oath that she had increased (to toxic levels, in the case of sertraline) at Holmes’s last clinic visit a few weeks before he did the deed.
Holmes’s Irrational “Under-the-Influence” Weapons Purchases – a Sure Sign of Insanity
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Marti Oakley
The PPJ Gazette 