Case goes to jury
BRUNSWICK, Ga. — Prosecutors and defense attorneys agreed on one thing Monday in final arguments to a Georgia jury: When Justin Ross Harris arrived at work more than two years ago and locked his car, his toddler son was left behind in the back seat and suffered a slow and agonizing death.
Now jurors must decide why that happened. Harris’ defense attorney argued Monday that his client was “clueless” and forgetful. But a prosecutor called Harris a murderer with a “malignant heart” who killed his child to escape his family commitments as he sank deeper into a double life of sexual flirting and affairs with women he met online.
“It’s not a case of an adult hating his child,” prosecutor Chuck Boring told jurors. “It’s just that he loved himself and his other obsessions more than that little boy.”
Harris left his 22-month-old son, Cooper, strapped into his car seat in the back of his SUV on June 18, 2014. The boy was dead when his father pulled him from the vehicle more than seven hours later. He told police he took Cooper to breakfast that morning and then drove straight to work, forgetting to take the child to day care.
Defense attorney Maddox Kilgore told jurors that police rushed to judgment in concluding a crime had been committed and then used evidence of Harris’ affairs outside his marriage “to essentially bury him in a mountain of his own sexual sins.” He insisted the child’s death was unrelated.
“If it’s an accident, it’s not a crime,” Kilgore said. “He is responsible. Only him. Nobody else. And he has acknowledged that from day one. But responsible is not the same thing as criminal.”
The jurors heard nearly five hours of closing arguments altogether.
