A Dark Night in Aurora Quotes

“I did not find, and don’t believe today, that Holmes met accepted psychiatric criteria for a diagnosis of schizophrenia or its even more serious cousin, schizoaffective disorder, at the time of the shootings.”
― William H. Reid, A Dark Night in Aurora: Inside James Holmes and the Colorado Mass Shootings

“My opinions about Holmes’s legal sanity were similar to Dr. Metzner’s: as of July 20, 2012, Holmes did not suffer from a mental disease or defect that prevented him from forming a culpable mental state. Regardless of any mental disorder or psychiatric symptoms he may have had at those relevant times, he knew that his shootings and killings would be, and were, illegal and socially wrong. He knew that others, including law enforcement officers and his psychiatrists, would try to stop him if they were aware of what he was planning to do. He knew the consequences to others, and to himself, of his actions, and he knowingly intended to carry them out in spite of their illegality and those likely consequences. He also understood the moral—as contrasted with legal—wrongfulness of his shootings and killings.”
― William H. Reid, A Dark Night in Aurora: Inside James Holmes and the Colorado Mass Shootings

“The testing instruments Dr. Gray and Dr. Manguso used also had elements to uncover different kinds of malingering, lack of interest in answering, and random answers. “Malingering” is a more complicated concept than simply trying to look sick when one is actually well. Some people try to “fake bad,” to appear sicker or more mentally ill than they are. Others, including some criminal defendants who don’t like the idea of being called crazy, try to “fake good”—that is, to look normal.”
― William H. Reid, A Dark Night in Aurora: Inside James Holmes and the Colorado Mass Shootings

“Blaming the shootings on the doctors or lack of money doesn’t wash, of course. It’s a ridiculous rationalization, or just crazy. Holmes admits that Drs. Fenton and Feinstein offered to see him regardless of insurance and that he had plenty of money and additional support from his parents. Bob and Arlene had told him clearly that money was no problem when it came to getting psychiatric help.”
― William H. Reid, A Dark Night in Aurora: Inside James Holmes and the Colorado Mass Shootings

“He maintained later that he stopped seeing Fenton because he lost his insurance when he dropped out of graduate school, implying that if she’d kept seeing him, he wouldn’t have committed the Century 16 murders.”
― William H. Reid, A Dark Night in Aurora: Inside James Holmes and the Colorado Mass Shootings

“To those who don’t understand why Fenton or Feinstein didn’t simply put Holmes into a hospital whether he wanted to go or not: it just doesn’t work that way. Protection from unjustified confinement is a very important civil right in the United States.”
― William H. Reid, A Dark Night in Aurora: Inside James Holmes and the Colorado Mass Shootings