Georgia’s Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned a father’s sentence for murder and other charges, nearly six years after he was found guilty of deliberately letting his young son die in a hot car.
The father, Justin Ross Harris, was convicted of manslaughter and other charges in 2016 and was sentenced to life without parole after his trial was moved from Cobb County, near Atlanta, to Glyn County in southeastern Georgia. against the background of intense publicity.
Georgia’s Supreme Court has ruled that extensive evidence of Mr Harris’s sexual activity presented during the trial was “extremely and unfairly damaging” and could influence the jury’s decision to convict him of intentionally causing his son’s death. his Cooper, who is 22 years old. months.
Prosecutors presented evidence in part in support of his 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 continue having sex with women. which he met online, “the court said.
“Since the properly accepted evidence that the applicant maliciously and intentionally left Cooper to die is far from overwhelming,” the court said. “.
The court ruled in decision 6 to 3 that prosecutors could choose to try Mr Harris again on charges related to Cooper’s death.
Cobb County District Attorney’s Office Flynn D. Brody Jr. said in a statement Wednesday: “Our office plans to file a motion to reconsider this case.”
Maddox Kilgore, one of Mr Harris’s lawyers, said he was not surprised by the court’s decision and that Mr Harris’s parents were crying, praying and rejoicing.
“This is a huge first step towards correcting a mistake,” he said, “and this mistake, of course, was clearly the unfair process we had in 2016.
The court upheld convictions on three charges unrelated to Cooper’s death and instead focused on Mr. Harris’s electronic communications with a minor girl. Mr Harris was sentenced to 12 years in prison on the charges.
The main facts about 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 as expected. dropped out of kindergarten, as usual, strapped into a car seat facing back in the back seat, the court said. After nearly seven hours in the hot car, Cooper died of hyperthermia.
Mr Harris’s lawyers say he is “a loving father who never abused Cooper and simply but tragically forgot he didn’t leave the child this morning”, the court said.
In November 2016, the jury convicted Mr Harris of eight counts – five related to Cooper’s death and three related to Mr Harris’s electronic communications with the underage girl.
During the trial, prosecutors presented extensive evidence of Mr Harris’s extramarital affairs in support of the allegations.
Jurors heard testimony from dozens of witnesses about Mr Harris’s sexual activities for several days, saw hundreds of obscene and sometimes illegal sexual messages he exchanged with young women and girls, and received nine photos of his erect penis, ensuring the jury “I do not miss the fact that he is a repulsive person,” the court said.
The evidence “convincingly shows” that Mr Harris was “a pervert, a pervert and even a sexual predator”, the court said.
But the evidence is “little, if at all” to answer the key question of why Mr Harris drove away from Cooper that morning, the court ruled.
Instead, the evidence probably led the jury to conclude that Mr. Harris was “the type of man who would engage in other morally repulsive behavior (such as leaving his child to die painfully in a hot car) and who deserves punishment, even if jurors do not “they were convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that he had deliberately killed Cooper,” the court ruled.
The court said some of the evidence was sufficiently admissible to establish the theory of the motives of the accusation and that it was “legally sufficient” to support Mr Harris’s convictions for the crimes against Cooper. But the trial court had to exclude much of it “because it was unnecessarily cumulative and damaging,” the ruling said.
Extensive evidence that Mr Harris committed sexual offenses against minors may have had a “significant blurring effect” that forced him to continue in an unfair disadvantage when defending himself against allegations that he left Cooper in the car to die, the court said.
The court ruled that the trial court had also erred in rejecting Mr Harris’ request to separate the allegations concerning Cooper from those relating to his communication with the underage girl.
Judge Mary Staley Clark of the Supreme Court, who presided over the trial in 2016, announced her retirement this year and is now a senior judge of the Supreme Court, according to Christopher Hansard, the court administrator.
In an email, Mr Hansard wrote that Judge Clark “will not be able to comment on this case as it is still pending”.
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