BOULDER, Colorado — The man suspected of murdering 10 people at a Boulder King Soopers is scheduled to be in court Tuesday for a hearing that could set the stage for him to go to trial.
Ahmad Alissa faces 10 counts of first-degree murder and numerous other charges in the March 22, 2021, attack on the store.
After Judge Ingrid Bakke ruled last month that the suspect is competent to stand trial, the next step is Tuesday’s preliminary hearing.
“A preliminary hearing is merely a requirement that the prosecution show probable cause for the various charges filed,” said 9NEWS legal analyst Scott Robinson. “In a case like this, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion that there's probable cause that the defendant was in fact guilty of at least the vast majority of the counts.”
Assuming Bakke agrees that the prosecution has met that burden, she could schedule an arraignment – where the suspect would enter a plea – and set a date for the trial.
The suspect faces 115 charges:
- 10 counts of first-degree murder;
- 47 counts of attempted first-degree murder;
- 1 count of first-degree assault;
- 10 counts of possession of a large-capacity magazine during the commission of a felony;
- 47 counts of crime of violence with a semiautomatic assault weapon, a sentencing enhancer.
The suspect’s attorneys raised the issue of his competency back in September 2021. Doctors who evaluated him concluded that he was not competent to proceed – meaning he was not able to understand the proceedings or assist in his own defense.
After extensive treatment, including forced medication, he was restored to competency earlier this fall.
With that issue settled – at least for now – Robinson said he expects the man’s attorneys will use Tuesday’s hearing to begin laying the foundation for their defense.
“I anticipate the defense will do everything they can to start the process of an insanity plea,” he said. “So they're going to try and elicit from all prosecution witnesses any information they can get that relates to the altered mental state of their client at the time of the incident.”
If a jury were to find the suspect not guilty by reason of insanity, he would avoid a prison sentence but would be sent to a mental hospital for treatment until such time as he was judged to no longer be a danger to himself or others.
“In practice, a defendant in a first-degree murder case is found not guilty by reason of insanity almost never ever gets out of the hospital,” Robinson said.
In the meantime, the question of the suspect's competency could come up again.
In her ruling last month, Bakke called the suspect's competency “tenuous” and urged his continued treatment at the Colorado Mental Health Institute at Pueblo, where he is forced to take medication. The fear is that if he stops taking the drugs he’s on, he would no longer be competent to stand trial.
“The victims are not out of the competency woods yet,” Robinson said.
The “tenuous” nature of his mental state means that “any trial date would be tenuous.”
“If the suspect lapses into incompetency at the end, then all bets are off, and there’d be no trial until that individual is found, again, to be restored to competency sometime in the future,” Robinson said.
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