“Because the evidence accepted that the Appellant allowed Cooper to die maliciously and deliberately was not overwhelming,” the court said, of the juror. “ In addition to three counts of murder, Harris pleaded guilty to two counts of child cruelty to Cooper’s death and three counts of committing sexually explicit material with minors. The Georgia Supreme Court reversed only Harris’s convictions for crimes against his son. Harris had not challenged the others in his appeal, the ruling said, and they remain in place. Cobb County Sheriff’s Office plans to file a motion for reconsideration, the office said in a statement Wednesday.
A child died after 7 hours in the hot car
One hot summer day in June 2014, Harris tied Cooper to his rear-facing seat in his car and drove from his family home to a nearby Chick-fil-A. Instead of leaving his son in day care afterwards, he went to work, parked and got in, leaving Cooper tied up in the car for the next seven hours. He stopped the car early that afternoon, ostensibly to put away some light bulbs he had bought. But just that afternoon, while driving to a nearby movie theater, Harris claimed to have noticed that his son was still in the car. He pulled into a parking lot of a mall, pulling the child’s body from the SUV. While witnesses at the scene said Harris looked distressed, Cobb County prosecutors argued at trial that he deliberately left Cooper locked in his car that day to relieve him of family obligations. Defense attorneys, meanwhile, argued that Cooper’s death was a tragic accident caused by his father’s lack of memory.
The evidence did not answer the question of intent, the court rules
To support their case, prosecutors cited what they described as a “double life.” In one, Cooper was a loving father and husband to his wife, family, and friends. But he also engaged in online sex with many women – including two underage girls – while also having extramarital sex. The day Harris was accused of deliberately leaving his son in the hot car, he had sex with six women, including a minor, according to telephone records. Defense attorneys denied it, arguing that Harris’s sexual behavior had nothing to do with his son’s death. But the state, his attorney said in his latest arguments, used it to describe his client as “so immoral, he is so reprehensible that he can do just that.” Georgia’s Supreme Court apparently agreed, with the majority writing in its opinion on Wednesday that prosecutors presented “extensive evidence” that “conclusively proves that the Appellate Court was peaceful, perverted, and even sexually predatory.” “This evidence did little to answer the fundamental question of Appellant’s intent when he left Cooper,” the opinion said. behavior (such as leaving his child to die painfully in a hot car) and who deserved punishment … ” The court ruled that the evidence presented at the trial was “legally sufficient” to support the conviction for murder. However, while some of the information about Harris’s sexual activity was “duly acceptable”, the trial court should have ruled out much of the evidence, the court said, “because it was unnecessarily cumulative and harmful”.
