Prosecutors will not retry Justin Ross Harris for murder

Almost a year after a state high court overturned his murder conviction, prosecutors announced that they will not seek to retry Justin Ross Harris for leaving his 22-month-old son Cooper Harris to die in a hot car.

The Supreme Court of Georgia ruled last year that the trial court improperly failed to sever charges involving one of the minors with whom defendant Harris communicated.

“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. “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.”

Harris, 42, will continue to serve his 12-year prison sentence for charges including criminal attempt to commit sexual exploitation of children and dissemination of harmful material to minors.

Cooper tragically passed away on June 18, 2014, after his father left him in an SUV during work, according to the high court’s ruling. The child, who had been strapped into a rear-facing car seat in the back, was supposed to be at a day care. Prosecutors argued that defendant Harris meant to kill the child in order to free himself up for more extramarital relationships. That included sexing an underage high school girl. Evidence at the murder trial included enlarged pictures of Harris’ penis.

The court determined that those charges, when tried with the murder charge, were prejudicial, and without that extra evidence, they are not sure a jury would have convicted Harris of the latter.

“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,” then-Chief Justice David E. Nahmias wrote for the majority in a 6-3 decision.