12 dead, 58 injured in Colorado at midnight showing of Dark Knight

Mozart was a prodigy. Kaczynski skipped 6th grade - and was living in the woods by the time he was 26.

I'm not that interested in how the press categorizes mass murderers, but if Holmes is smarter than average, why not say so? I haven't seen anyone calling him a genius.

 

james holmes genius
About 1,730,000 results (0.13 seconds)

 

I haven't seen anyone in the press call him a genius.

 

Try Holmes and brilliant.
Granted, a lot of those descriptors are referring to his father, who really was an innovator.
Some of the crackpot sites infer that young Isaac Newton is being framed because his father was about to testify before the Senate as a whistle-blower in the Libor scandal.

 

I know this creep is in his early 20s but teen spree killers get graded on a curve. If they manage to resemble normal up to their day of reckoning (and can string a few sentences together,) they get hailed as masterminds.

 

james holmes aardvark
About 485,000 results (0.42 seconds)

james holmes rhinoceros
About 114,000,000 results (0.32 seconds)

Telling.

 

What a silly post.
Come stronger next time.
The adults in the room were having a decent discussion.

 

3OF, you raise an interesting journalistic question, which is why there seems to be a template into which this type of story tends to be shoehorned. But to suggest that because this dude washed out in his orals he must not be very bright is terribly simplistic. Lots of bright people -- indeed, very bright, even exceptional people -- don't make it through a Ph.D. program. Not for reasons of intelligence, but for reasons of temperament or inherent interest. Now not all of them wash out during comps, but lots of them wash out. On average, something on the order of 40% of doctoral students who get at or near the dissertation stage never progress any further. Lots of times it becomes obvious that a student is going to have that kind of experience, so the comps/orals are used to show them the door. I tell my doctoral-level students that almost no-one "fails" in a doctoral program, but many people find out that an academic career likely isn't their cup of tea.

 

Hey, you're the one citing Google results.

Just pointing out that by your standards, for every person posting that James Holmes is a genius there are 100 people posting that he's a rhino.

 

So noted.
Holmes came from a high-achieving family.
His adoptive father is extraordinarily well-accomplished.
Yes, Holmes was adopted. This has been under-reported, for whatever strange reason.
Maybe dreams of an academic career were not his own.
Pop Fischer: "You know, my mama wanted me to be a farmer."
Roy Hobbs: "My dad wanted me to be a baseball player."

 

I'm somewhat surprised about this, as it opens the door to an insanity plea. Holmes' defense was offering life in prison in exchange for a guilty plea. I understand that survivors want the satisfaction of a trial, but I hope they weighed that desire against the possible painful consequences of seeing him acquitted, a distinct possibility. Now, he'll never set foot on the outside again, either way. But certainly there would be a psychological toll taken by an acquittal, whatever its practical implications may or may not be as compared to a life imprisonment.