[JURIST] A Colorado jury on Friday sentenced James Holmes to life in prison for killing 12 people and injuring 70 in the 2012 shooting movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado. The sentence [court register, PDF], which carries no possibility of parole, came as a result of the jury’s inability to reach a unanimous decision about giving death penalty. The jury was the same one that last month found Holmes guilty [Washington Post report] on all 165 counts that he faced for the shooting. Holmes had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, with his attorneys two years ago stating that he was the gunman. Prosecutors argued during trial that the shooting had been carefully planned and that Holmes was not insane at the time of the attack.

Gun control has a prominent topic in US politics since a school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012. Last week US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter ordered a review [JURIST report] of military recruitment office security policies in the wake of a shooting at a Chattanooga, Tennessee Navy-Marine reserve center. Last December the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled [JURIST report] that a law prohibiting individuals who have been committed to a mental institution for any amount of time from possessing a firearm is unconstitutional under the Second Amendment. This court was the first to strike down a federal gun law under the Second Amendment since the Supreme Court [official website] effectively struck down [opinion] Washington, DC’s ban on firearm ownership six years ago. However, mass shootings in Colorado, Connecticut and elsewhere have spurred some state legislatures to create and adopt gun control laws. In August 2014 a federal judge for the US District Court for the District of Maryland [official website] upheld [JURIST report] portions of Maryland’s gun control law, which banned certain types of “assault weapons” and a limited gun magazines to 10 rounds, explaining that the law served a legitimate government interest of ensuring public safety. In June of that year a judge for the US District Court for the District of Colorado [official website] upheld [JURIST report] two Colorado statutes that expanded mandatory background checks and banned high capacity magazines.