Specifically, Ms. Chambers cited a Fox News report that the F.B.I. had taken possession of the package, when in fact it had been taken by the Aurora Police Department. News reports had said the package contained a notebook with violent drawings by Mr. Holmes. But Ms. Chambers said the package’s contents were not examined and had been held for further review.

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“The media is getting information from hoaxers, fraudsters, or maybe from nobody at all,” she said in the court filing.

Dr. Fenton could not be reached for comment. She has served as head of the university’s student mental health service since 2009 and is a member of the faculty.

In September 2004, Dr. Fenton received an admonition from Colorado’s board of medical examiners for prescribing medications — including the allergy medication Claritin, the sleeping pill Ambien, two tranquilizers and the narcotic painkiller Vicodin — for a few colleagues and her husband on several occasions, and failing to keep proper documentation of the prescriptions. The board noted in its admonition letter that Dr. Fenton was no longer writing prescriptions for people who were not her patients.

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A hearing on the defense motion will take place on Monday.

In the 60 days leading up to the shooting, Mr. Holmes bought four guns legally at local gun shops, law enforcement officials have said. He also bought more than 6,000 rounds of ammunition on the Internet.

Merely seeing a psychiatrist, even for a serious case of mental illness, would not trigger any of the safeguards for gun purchases, which are governed by federal law, said Daniel Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign and Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “There are no federal restrictions on the purchase of firearms for the mentally ill unless the person has been adjudicated by a court as being dangerously mentally ill,” he said.

When a court rules that a person is dangerously mentally ill, he said, the records should then be submitted to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, and the potential buyer would be classified as a prohibited purchaser — along with felons, domestic abusers and others.

Each state is supposed to maintain its own database of residents who have been declared dangerously mentally ill by a court, but in fact the Brady Center, after the shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007, found that millions of records were missing from the databases.