Justin Ross Harris sentenced to life for son's hot-car death
Summary: Justin Ross Harris was convicted to life in prison for the murder of his young son. Harris left his son in the backseat of his SUV while he went in for a seven hour workday at the Home Depot headquarters where he was employed. After returning to the car and finding his son's lifeless body, bystanders reported Harris screaming in agony and cradling the body. During the trial he was also convicted of several other crimes, including sexual exploitation of children, as it was found he had been sexting a minor (as well as several other women outside of his marriage) and had solicited a prostitute on multiple occasions. Surprisingly, his wife was the main defense witness in his trial, and described how she understood him seeking other women as they suffered multiple marital difficulties, and that it was almost certainly by accident that Harris left his son in the car long enough for him to perish.
Analysis: I'm not quite sure how to feel about this article. It feels impossible to me that what the defense argued could be true. How could someone simply forget that their young child was in the backseat of their car, even if it was in a backwards-facing car seat? What confuses me though is that Harris also showed extreme remorse upon finding his son dead. All I can think of is that some sort of mental illness must be the culprit. I can synthesize this to when John Adams defended the British soldiers at the Boston Massacre, as it is just as surprising that a woman would defend her cheating husband who killed their son through an act of neglect.
Wow, what terrible thing. I'm glad he got a life sentence, we don't need evil people like him walking amongst us.
ReplyDeleteThis is such a sad situation. I can't see how any father could have killed his son, and I agree that some kind of mental illness must have been the culprit of this extreme absent mindedness that resulted in the death of his son.
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