Prosecutors in Colorado are covering all their bases. On Monday they filed two sets of first-degree murder charges against James Holmes—two for each of the 12 deaths the 24-year-old is allegedly responsible for—in order to give the jury two separate avenues to a death-penalty sentence should Holmes’s lawyers successfully argue an insanity defense. The two sets of charges are “murder with deliberation,” which is equivalent to premeditated murder, and killing with “extreme indifference to the value of human life,” for which prosecutors must prove “an attitude of universal malice.”
