The case of the biology-professor-turned-murderer entered a new stage this month, with the indictment of Amy Bishop and the appointment, yesterday, of a judge to oversee her capital murder trial.

Alan Mann, a recently elected circuit court judge in Madison County, Alabama, will preside over the trial of Bishop, the biologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who thirteen months ago pulled a pistol during a faculty meeting and killed three colleagues in cold blood. Another three were injured.

Mann has been both a prosecutor and a criminal defense lawyer, with over 1200 criminal cases, including 17 capital murder cases, under his belt according to this biography.

On March 11, a grand jury handed down this indictment of Bishop, which charges her with one count of capital murder, meaning murder in which two or more people are killed as part of one plan or course of action. She is also charged with three counts of attempted murder – one for each of her three injured colleagues. In Alabama, capital murder is punishable by life in prison without parole, or by the death penalty. No hearing dates have yet been set in the case.

For a fascinating profile that seeks, partly through her unpublished novels, to get inside Bishop’s mind, see this piece by Amy Wallace in the March issue of Wired.

For Nature’s feature on the shooting, and for a news article that checks in on the biology department on the first anniversary of the shootings, see, respectively, here and here.