Colorado cinema gunman spared death penalty

A gunman who killed 12 people during a screening of Batman in a Colorado cinema has been spared the death penalty.

Instead James Holmes will serve life with no parole for the killings after a jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict on his sentence.

The 27-year-old opened fire inside a packed premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora in July 2012. Seventy others were also wounded in the attack.

Former neuroscience student Holmes had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity but was found to be legally sane.

Last month, a jury of nine women and three men found him guilty on all counts relating to the massacre.

Before the sentence was read out, Arapahoe County District CourtJudge Carlos Samour warned those in the public gallery against making any emotional outbursts.

If the jurors had been able to agree, Holmes would have been sentenced to execution by lethal injection.

Holmes showed no reaction, staring straight ahead with his hands in his pockets, as the verdict was announced.

It was on July 20, 2012, that Holmes, dressed in combat gear, entered The Century 16 cinema in Aurora, Colorado aiming to kill all 400 people inside.

Armed with a semi-automatic rifle and a shotgun, he began opening fire at random after letting off tear gas grenades.

Dozens of wounded survivors told how they tried to hide from his hail of bullets or stumbled over the bodies of loved ones as they tried to flee.

Prosecutors said Holmes tried to kill more than the 12 who died but his gun jammed. He was later arrested in the cinema car park.

During the trial, Holmes told the court he had secretly obsessed about killing since the age of 10.

He kept his mounting homicidal thoughts from a university psychiatrist he was seeing.

Instead, he described his plans in a notebook that he kept secret until hours before the attack, when he mailed it to the psychiatrist.

Holmes also constructed an elaborate booby-trap in his flat a few miles away.

It failed to explode, but it was designed to blow up and divert police and firefighters at the precise moment of his calculated attack.

The killing spree was the worst in America since the Columbine High School Massacre in 1999 in which Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher.