MARIETTA, Georgia (AP) — A Georgia father has been released from prison 10 years after his child died in a hot car, a case that made global headlines when prosecutors charged him with murder.
Justin Ross Harris was released from Macon State Prison on Sunday, Father's Day. He began serving his sentence on Dec. 6, 2016, according to Georgia Department of Corrections records.
He was booked into the Cobb County Jail on Sunday after being released from prison, according to jail records. He could serve the remaining two years of his sentence in county jail. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported,
Harris moved to the Atlanta area from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for work in 2012. He told police that on the morning of June 18, 2014, he forgot to drop his 22-month-old son, Cooper, off at day care. Instead, he drove straight to his job as a web developer for Home Depot and left the child in his car seat, he told investigators.
Cooper died after sitting for nearly seven hours in the back seat of a Hyundai Tucson SUV outside his father's office in a suburb of Atlanta, where temperatures that day reached the low 80s.
At trial, prosecutors presented the theory that Harris was unhappy in his marriage and killed his son so he could be free. They presented evidence of his extramarital sexual activity, which included exchanging sexually explicit messages and graphic photographs with women and girls and meeting some of them for sex.
Harris pleaded guilty a judge on eight counts, including malice murder, in November 2016 he was sentenced to He was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, plus an additional 32 years' imprisonment for the other offences.
But the Georgia Supreme Court voted 6-3 to overturn his murder and child cruelty convictions In June 2022, he said the jury saw evidence that was “grossly and improperly prejudicial.”
Prosecutors at the time said he would face no further trial in Cooper's death. The Cobb County District Attorney's Office, which prosecuted the case, said in a statement that it disagreed with the majority's decision. But because of that ruling, prosecutors said key evidence about Harris' motive was no longer available for them to use.
Harris's attorneys have always said he was a loving father and that his son's death was a tragic accident.
Although the state Supreme Court threw out the murder conviction, it upheld Harris's convictions for three sex crimes against the 16-year-old girl, which Harris did not appeal.
Harris served a prison sentence for a felony conviction – attempting to sexually abuse a minor, which resulted in a 10-year prison sentence, the Atlanta newspaper reported. Cobb County jail records show the remaining one-year sentence is for two felony convictions for distributing obscene material to minors. The county jail is in Marietta, a suburb of Atlanta, the same county where Cooper was killed.
Harris's case attracted extraordinary attention, making headlines around the world and sparking debate online and on cable news shows. After determining that pretrial publicity had made it too difficult to find an impartial jury in Cobb County in suburban Atlanta, the presiding judge agreed to move the trial to Brunswick, on the Georgia coast.