His father, Justin Ross Harris, had been convicted of manslaughter and other charges in 2016 and sentenced to life without parole after his trial was moved from Cobb County, near Atlanta, to Glein County in southeastern Georgia, amid widespread publicity. Georgia Supreme Court rules extensive evidence of Mr Harris’s sexual activities presented at trial was “extremely and unjustly damaging” and could have influenced the jury’s decision to convict him of intentionally causing his son’s death , Cooper, who was 22 years old. months. Prosecutors had presented the evidence in part to support their theory that Mr. Harris had deliberately abandoned his son to die in the back of his car so that “he could achieve his dream of being free to promote his sexual relations with women he knew on the Internet. “, Said the court. “Because the evidence accepted that the appellant maliciously and deliberately left Cooper dead was not at all overwhelming,” the court said, ». The court ruled in a 6 to 3 ruling that prosecutors may choose to try Mr. Harris again on charges related to Cooper’s death. The office of Cobb County Attorney Flynn D. Broady Jr. said in a statement Wednesday, “Our office plans to file a motion for a review of this case.” Maddox Kilgor, one of Mr Harris’s lawyers, said he was not surprised by the court ruling and that Mr Harris’s parents were crying, praying and rejoicing. “It’s a huge first step in correcting a mistake,” he said, “and that mistake, of course, was the obviously unfair trial we had in 2016.” The court upheld the convictions on three charges not related to Cooper’s death and instead focused on Harris’s electronic communications with a minor girl. Mr Harris was sentenced to 12 years in prison on those charges. The main facts of Cooper’s death were not disputed: On the morning of June 18, 2014, Mr. Harris, a web developer at Home Depot, closed the door of his Hyundai Tucson and went to work, leaving Cooper, who is supposed to have fell into the nursery, as usual, tied to a car seat facing backwards in the back seat, the court said. After nearly seven hours in the hot car, Cooper died of hyperthermia. Mr Harris’s lawyers said he was “a loving father who never abused Cooper and simply but tragically forgot that he had not left the child that morning”, the court said. In November 2016, a court convicted Mr. Harris of eight counts – five for Cooper’s death and three for Mr. Harris’s electronic communications with the minor girl. During the trial, prosecutors presented extensive evidence of Mr. Harris’s extramarital affair to support the allegations. Jurors listened for several days to testimonies from twelve witnesses about Mr. Harris’s sexual activity, saw hundreds of obscene and sometimes illicit sexual messages he exchanged with young women and girls, and were given nine photos of his erect penis. committee “do not miss the point that he was a disgusting person,” the court said. The evidence “showed convincingly” that Mr Harris was “a charity, a pervert and even a sex predator,” the court said. But the data did “a little, if nothing else” to answer the key question as to why Mr Harris had left Cooper by car that morning, the court ruled. On the contrary, the evidence probably led jurors to conclude that Mr. Harris was “the kind of person who would have another morally disgusting behavior (like letting his child die painfully in a hot car) and who deserved punishment, even “If the jurors were not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that he deliberately killed Cooper,” the court ruled. The court said some of the evidence was properly accepted to substantiate the prosecution’s motive theory and that it was “legally sufficient” to support Mr Harris’ convictions for the Cooper crimes. But the trial court should have ruled out much of it “because it was unnecessarily cumulative and damaging,” the ruling said. Extensive evidence that Mr Harris had committed sex crimes against minors probably had a “substantial” spotting effect that forced him to take an unfairly disadvantaged position when defending himself against allegations that he left Cooper in the car for dies. said the court. The court ruled that the trial court also erred in rejecting Mr Harris’s proposal to separate Cooper’s charges from those relating to his relationship with the minor girl. Supreme Court Justice Mary Staley Clark, who presided over the trial in 2016, announced her resignation this year and is now a senior Supreme Court justice, according to Christopher Hansard, the court’s administrator. In an email, Mr Hansard wrote that Judge Clark “is not going to be able to comment on this case, as it is still ongoing”.
