Mother of toddler killed in hot car says overturning ex-husband’s murder conviction is ‘vindication’
Justin Ross Harris will get a re-trial
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The mother of a toddler who was killed when her ex-husband left him inside a hot car has called a court’s decision to overturn his murder conviction the right one.
Leanna Taylor, the child’s mother, said through her lawyer on Wednesday that Justin Ross Harris’s life sentence being overturned was “vindication” for both herself, the father and their deceased son, Cooper.
She has long maintained Mr Harris’s innocence in the case, in which the 41-year-old was sentenced to life without parole for the death of Cooper, who died after being left inside a hot car for several hours in 2014.
“This is vindication for, obviously, Ross Harris and really vindication for my client Leanna and their son Cooper,” said Ms Taylor’s attorney Lawrence Zimmerman in a statement seen by multiple news outlets.
He added that overturning Mr Harris’s conviction also meant that Cooper could be remembered in a different light, and that more should be done technologically to prevent such tragedies insetead of “prosecuting parents”.
“(She) doesn’t want someone to sit in prison or be convicted of something that she knows they didn’t do intentionally”, Mr Zimmeran said of Cooper’s mother, who was a witness at Mr Harris’s trial in 2016 and has long maintained her ex-husband’s innocence.
As CNN reported on Thursday, Ms Taylor has long-called for state authorities to put resources into “what could actually save the lives” with laws requiring devices that can “stop these tragedies”.
She added of her now ex-husband: “While this will not change anything about my day to day life, I do hope that it shows people what those closest to the case have been saying since the beginning”.
“Ross was a loving and proud father to Cooper. At the same time, Ross was being a terrible husband. These two things can and did exist at the same time,” she said.
Georgia’s Supreme Court said on Wednesday that although there was sufficient evidence to support Mr Harris’s convictions, some of the evidence presented to the jury in 2014 was potentially prejudicial.
He will now be entitled to a re-trial on the same murder and child cruelty charges he faced in eight years ago, although his three convictions on sex crimes charges were upheld without appeal.
Ms Taylor argued that Cobb County prosecutors had wrongfully pursued evidence showing Mr Harris to be living a “double life” with messages to multiple women, including two minors, presented as a form of reasoning for the death of Cooper.
One of three justices who wrote a partial dissent against Mr Harris, Justice Charlie Bethel, said the state was “entitled to introduce, in detail, evidence of the nature, scope, and extent of the truly sinister motive it ascribed to Harris.”