Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Arizona deal: Life, no parole
Loughner guilty in rampage
Jared Lee Loughner on Tuesday pleaded guilty to killing six people and trying to assassinate then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords last year after being found mentally competent by a federal judge in Tucson, Ariz.
Loughner, 23, will face life in prison without parole under a plea agreement with federal prosecutors. With his parents looking on, the former community college student pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Larry Burns to 19 counts of murder, attempted murder and other charges related to the Jan. 8, 2011, shooting. Loughner had previously pleaded innocent.
“I plead guilty,” Loughner said as Burns read each charge against him in court. His parents, sitting three rows behind their son, bowed their heads as he spoke. After the hearing,
Loughner’s parents cried and embraced.
In a statement, Giffords’ husband, Mark Kelly, said the couple had been in contact with the U.S. attorney’s office as the negotiations over Loughner’s plea evolved.
“The pain and loss” caused by the rampage “are incalculable,” Kelly said. “Avoiding a trial will allow us — and we hope the whole Southern Arizona community — to continue with our recovery and move forward with our lives.”
About 30 victims, survivors and their representatives in the courtroom watched as Loughner changed his plea. Ron Barber, an aide to Giffords who also was wounded in the shooting and now holds Giffords’ seat, cradled his wife after Loughner pleaded guilty to shooting him.
“In making the determination not to seek the death penalty, I took into consideration the views of the victims and survivor families, the recommendations of the prosecutors assigned to the case, and the applicable law,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in an e-mailed statement.
It was “clear” Loughner was mentally ill and not diagnosed before the shootings, John Leonardo, the U.S. attorney for Arizona, said after the hearing. The decision not to seek the death penalty was a “certain and just resolution to the case,” he said.
Barber said he hopes the plea will help the victims and their families “move forward and continue our healing process.”
“I truly believe that justice was done today,” he said after the hearing. “It is important to me that this individual never again is in a position in which he can cause harm to anyone else.”
Susan Hileman, who accompanied slain 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Green to the gathering last year outside a supermarket and was wounded in the attack, said nothing would return her life to what it was before the shooting.
“This is so sad — a 23year- old who’s going to spend the rest of his life in a box. I feel empty. What I want, I can’t have,” she said, adding that she was relieved the case is over. Still: “It’s like a Band-Aid that keeps getting ripped off.”
Burns set Nov. 15 for Loughner’s sentencing. Pima County prosecutor Barbara LaWall said in February that state charges would be filed against Loughner after the federal case ends. A call to her media office Tuesday seeking comment on the state’s case wasn’t immediately returned.
Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, was among 13 wounded in the shooting rampage outside a supermarket where she was holding a community meeting. Bystanders wrestled Loughner to the ground. Giffords survived a gunshot wound through her head. She resigned Jan. 25 to focus on her recovery. A federal judge, John Roll, was among the people killed.
Loughner understands that he will never leave prison, Christina Pietz, a Bureau of Prisons psychologist who has treated him, said during Tuesday’s hearing.
Wearing khakis, Loughner sat quietly throughout the hearing and smiled at one point when Pietz remarked that he had bonded with one of the federal prison guards.
“He’s a different person in his appearance and his affect than the first time I laid eyes on him,” said Burns, who then accepted the plea agreement and added that he found it to be in the best interest of everyone involved.
“There leaves no question in my mind he understands what’s going on today,” Burns said in accepting Loughner’s guilty plea.
Burns had previously determined that Loughner wasn’t competent to stand trial and had ordered him to remain in U.S. custody for treatment or until doctors determined he was mentally able to help in his defense.
Loughner had been medicated with anti- psychotic drugs and confined to a federal prison hospital in Springfield, Mo. The drugging was approved by Burns, over objections of Loughner’s lawyer, on grounds that Loughner was a danger to others.
Pietz testified that as time went on and Loughner took prescribed medication voluntarily, the weight of his actions on Jan. 8, 2011, dawned on him. “I did especially cry about the child,” Loughner told Pietz once, referring to Christina.
The volatility of Loughner’s mental state was a deciding factor in the agreement. On May 25, 2011, he delivered an angry, incoherent rant in court just before Burns ruled him incompetent to stand trial and halted the legal proceedings. Several months later, Loughner returned to court and sat for seven hours, silent and expressionless, seemingly under the effect of the psychotropic drugs he had been compelled to take.
For prosecutors, pushing for a trial carried clear risks, legal experts said. Loughner could have exploded at any moment, or jurors could have been swayed by the defense’s arguments and found him innocent by reason of insanity.
A plea agreement offers something for both sides, said Quin Denvir, a California defense attorney who has worked with Loughner attorney Judy Clarke on the case against unabomber Ted Kaczynski.
Prosecutors would avoid a potentially lengthy and costly trial and appeal, knowing that the defendant will be locked up for life.
Clarke managed to avoid the death penalty for other high-profile clients such as Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph, who bombed abortion clinics in the late 1990s and Atlanta’s Olympic park in 1996.
The decision to spare Loughner a federal death sentence makes sense, said Dale Baich, a federal public defender in Phoenix who handles capital case appeals and isn’t involved in the case.
“As time went on, and there were numerous evaluations, I think everybody had a better understanding of Mr. Loughner’s mental illness,” Baich said. He added: “It appears that he will need to be treated for the rest of his life in order to remain competent.”
Loughner left behind a note suggesting he was plotting the Jan. 8, 2011, attack, which the government suggested showed he knew what he was doing. But his friends and co-workers said Loughner became mentally unbalanced after dropping out of school and losing his job, signs that he was suffering from deep mental trauma.
Loughner’s guilty plea comes as lawyers prepare their defense of James Holmes, the former neuroscience graduate student at the University of Colorado in Denver who is charged with killing 12 and injuring 58 at a theater in the suburb of Aurora during a July 20 midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises.
On Sunday, a man identified as Wade Michael Page killed six people in a Sikh temple near Milwaukee before police shot him dead. Page was a former U.S. Army serviceman and a member of several white-supremacist rock bands.