Jared Lee Loughner and 6 other mass shooters: How the cases were resolved

Jared Lee Loughner was found competent Tuesday to stand trial and pled guilty to 19 counts, including murder, for the January 2011 shooting in Tucson in which six people were killed and 13 wounded – including then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) of Arizona. In mass shootings like this where the perpetrator was not killed during the rampage, here’s how the cases have been resolved.

2. Thurston High School shooting

Mike Blake/Reuters/File
Students from Thurston High School arrive for counseling the day following a shooting rampage in which two students were killed and 22 injured at their high school in Springfield, Ore., May 22, 1998. Fifteen-year-old Kipland Kinkel was arrested following the shooting. Blue ribbons have been attached to trees and poles throughout the town in memory of the victims.

In May 1998, Kipland Kinkel shot and killed his parents before going on a shooting rampage at his high school that left two students dead and wounded 22 others. Mr. Kinkel was 15 at the time.

Just days before his trial was set to begin in 1999, Kinkel pleaded guilty to murder and attempted murder, and was sentenced to 111 years in prison without possibility of parole. As part of his guilty plea, he relinquished the possibility of being acquitted by reason of insanity.

In 2007, Kinkel sought a new trial, saying that his attorneys should have used an insanity defense and taken the case to trial, but his plea was denied.

2 of 6

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.