Colorado's long-awaited cinema massacre trial began on Monday with opening statements in which jurors were asked to decide whether gunman James Holmes was insane when he killed a dozen moviegoers in 2012, or a calculating mass murderer who deserves execution.
Former National Football League star Aaron Hernandez was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday for murdering an acquaintance in an industrial park near his Massachusetts home, concluding the first of two murder trials he faces this year.
Oklahoma prosecutors charged a sheriff's reserve deputy with second-degree manslaughter on Monday in the fatal shooting of a black man this month in Tulsa, the most recent in a series of U.S. cases that have raised questions about race relations and policing.