Prosecutors Won’t Retry Father Whose Son Died in Hot Car
Prosecutors have decided not to retry a Georgia father whose son died after he left him in a hot car, effectively ending the case against Justin Ross Harris nearly a year after the Georgia Supreme Court overturned his conviction on charges of malice murder and child cruelty.
The Cobb County District Attorney’s Office said it had conducted a thorough review of the case in the 11 months since the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that the evidence of Mr. Harris’s sexual activities that had been presented at his trial was “extremely and unfairly prejudicial” and could have affected the jury’s decision to convict him in 2016.
Prosecutors had presented that evidence to bolster their contention that Mr. Harris had intentionally left his son Cooper, who was 22 months old, to die so he could pursue sexual relationships with women he met online. Mr. Harris’s lawyers said that he had merely forgotten that the boy was in the car.
“Crucial motive evidence that was admitted at the first trial in 2016 is no longer available to the state due to the majority decision of the Supreme Court,” the district attorney’s office said in a statement. “Therefore, after much thought and deliberation, we have made the difficult decision to not retry Justin Ross Harris on the reversed counts of the indictment.”
Source: The New York Times
