OAN’s Brooke Mallory
4:46 PM – Thursday, June 20, 2024
Ten years following the death of his toddler son, who passed away after being left in a hot car back in 2014, Justin Ross Harris was freed from prison on Sunday.
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According to Georgia Department of Corrections records, Harris was released from the Macon State Prison on Sunday, Father’s Day.
He began serving his sentence back on December 6th, 2016.
In 2012, Harris relocated for employment from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to the Atlanta region. He admitted to authorities that he neglected to drop off his 22-month-old son Cooper at daycare on the morning of June 18th, 2014.
Harris told detectives that he had left Cooper in his car seat and drove directly to his job, where he worked as a web developer for Home Depot.
“Cooper [the toddler son] died after sitting for about seven hours in the back seat of the Hyundai Tucson SUV outside his father’s office in suburban Atlanta, where temperatures that day reached at least into the high 80s,” CBS News reported.
Prosecutors conjectured during the trial that Harris had purposely killed his son in order to end his marriage, since he was extremely unhappy. They provided proof of his extramarital affairs as well, such as when cellular evidence showed him meeting up with several other women for sex and exchanging obscene images and text messages with them, as well as younger girls too.
In November 2016, Harris was found guilty and convicted on eight charges, including murder with malice. For his additional offenses, a judge also sentenced him to 32 years more in prison and life without the possibility of parole.
However, in June 2022, the Georgia Supreme Court voted 6-3 to reverse his convictions for murder and child cruelty, citing how the jury saw evidence that was “extremely and unfairly prejudicial.”
At the time, the prosecution declared that he would not be tried again in connection with Cooper’s death.
In a statement, the Cobb County district attorney’s office, which handled the case’s prosecution, expressed disagreement with the majority’s ruling. Additionally, prosecutors maintained that they could no longer use the same vital evidence on Harris’ alleged motivation as a result of the ruling.
Attorneys for Harris had consistently argued that the boy’s death was simply an accident and that he was a “loving father” who lost track of time.
Meanwhile, the state’s Supreme Court upheld Harris’ convictions for three other separate sex crimes against an unidentified 16-year-old girl, despite dismissing the murder conviction, for which Harris had not filed an appeal. The sex crimes were allegedly discovered after prosecutors previously investigated his phone data.
Harris was still freed from prison on Sunday after serving his sentence for those particular offenses.
The decision to relocate the trial to Brunswick, Georgia’s coast, was agreed upon by the presiding judge, who argued that the trial in Cobb County, suburban Atlanta, would be more difficult to find an impartial jury due to the pretrial publicity.
Data from the advocacy group Kids and Car Safety shows that 38 children, on average, pass away every year from heat stroke while inside a hot car. According to a recent CBS News data analysis, at least one hot car death occurred every week during the sweltering summer months, accounting for 83% of all hot car deaths over the previous six years. The statistics are also not limited to the U.S. states with the highest average temperatures.
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