The man who terrorized a store full of shoppers by murdering 10 people at a Colorado King Soopers grocery store in 2021 has been convicted and sentenced to the maximum penalty.
Ahmad Alissa was sentenced just hours after his conviction. He was given 10 life sentences, plus an additional 1,334 years in state prison.
During the trial, Boulder district attorney Michael Dougherty successfully argued against Alissa’s insanity plea defense. This was not a man who did not know right from wrong. Dougherty said Alissa researched other massacres, such as the 2019 spree shooting at a Texas Walmart in 2019, for months before carrying out his deadly attack. “Make no mistake about it folks,” Dougherty said. Alissa had planned the attack out well in advance.
Dougherty said that while Ahmad planned to commit the massacre, he chose his victims at random when he pulled up to the supermarket in Boulder. Witnesses described Alissa shooting people in the parking lot, then entering the store and appearing to “hunt” for victims. Dougherty called the mass murder “the ultimate act of cowardice.”
The trial went on for ten days. Alissa was diagnosed with schizophrenia after the shooting, and it is this condition that formed the basis of his insanity defense. But contrary to popular misconception, criminals almost never get away with it simply because they’re diagnosed with a mental illness. It is not hearing voices or having other hallucinations that defines “insanity” in American courtrooms. Instead, the test is whether a person knew right from wrong when the crime was committed. If they did, then the insanity plea usually fails.
That’s exactly what the prosecution argued. The state agreed that Alissa has schizophrenia, but that did not stop him from being able to plan the attack, and it doesn’t mean that he could not distinguish right from wrong.
The jury only took six hours to deliberate before finding Alissa guilty.
The killings took place on March 22, 2021. Among the ten killed were Boulder police officer Eric Talley. DA Dougherty said the sentencing was the closing point for “an incredibly long and painful journey for the victims.
