Justin Ross Harris, Cooper Harris, and police at the scene of the boy’s hot car death in 2014 (WXIA screenshots)
A 43-year-old father in Georgia convicted of murder in the hot car death of his 22-month-old son was released from prison 10 years after the boy died, only to end up right back in a different jail.
Justin Ross Harris, whose murder conviction was overturned by the Georgia Supreme Court two years ago, left the Macon State Prison on Sunday — Father’s Day — and was subsequently booked into the Cobb County Jail, prison and jail records reviewed by Law&Crime show.
Harris was in prison serving a 12-year prison on other charges: 10 years for one count of criminal attempt to commit sexual exploitation of children and one year each on two counts of dissemination of harmful material to minors. Harris had completed his sentence for the sexual exploitation charge and will serve the remainder of his sentence in county jail, according to a report from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Harris’ son, Cooper, passed away on June 18, 2014, after his father left him in an SUV during work, according to the high court’s ruling. Harris was supposed to drop Cooper off at day care, but went straight to work, leaving his son strapped into a rear-facing car seat in the back seat for about seven hours. Cooper died of hyperthermia on a day where the temperature got into the 80s.
“I knew that I had done what every parent in their life fears they’ve done, and that’s just leave their son in a car on a hot day,” Harris said of his Cooper’s death.
However, during the murder trial, prosecutors argued that Harris purposely left Cooper in the car intending for the boy to die because it would free him up for more extramarital relationships. Prosecutors offered evidence of Harris repeatedly complaining about being married and having children, and showed that he sent explicit messages to an underage high school girl.
Evidence at the murder trial included enlarged photos of Harris’ penis.
He was convicted of murder in 2016 and sentenced to life in a Georgia state prison without the opportunity for parole plus an additional 32 years.
Harris appealed his conviction all the way up to the Georgia Supreme Court, where the majority of justices agreed that the trial court erred by refusing to sever the murder charge from the charges involving Harris’ explicit communications with a juvenile, reasoning that child exploitation charges were prejudicial when combined with the murder charge.
In a 6-3 decision, the state’s highest court upheld Harris’s conviction for sexting a juvenile high school girl, but determined the state went overboard by submitting evidence of Harris’ extramarital pursuits in the homicide case. That erroneously submitted evidence included the pictures of his penis, which he sent to the juvenile victim.
“Notably, at oral argument in this Court, the State’s counsel acknowledged that she did not know of a proper purpose for which the prosecutor introduced these nine, enlarged copies of pictures of Appellant’s erect penis,” then-Chief Justice David E. Nahmias wrote. “Because the properly admitted evidence that Appellant maliciously and intentionally left Cooper to die was far from overwhelming, we cannot say that it is highly probable that the erroneously admitted sexual evidence did not contribute to the jury’s guilty verdicts.”
The court affirmed Harris’ convictions on the three charges relating to his lewd exchange with the juvenile girl.
Following the high court’s ruling, the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office decided not to try Harris for murder a second time.
“For the last 11 months, the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office has conducted a thorough review of the entire case file,” Cobb County prosecutors said last year. “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. 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.”
Leanna Taylor, Cooper’s mother and Harris’ ex-wife, has previously said that Harris “destroyed” her life and left her in a position where she “may never trust anyone again.” However, she also testified in his defense, telling jurors that “it never crossed my mind that (Harris) had done it on purpose,” Atlanta Fox affiliate WAGA reported.
“Never,” she said at the time. “It was an accident.”
Alberto Luperon contributed to this report.
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