The murder trial of Justin Ross Harris will begin Monday in Cobb County Superior Court — with a parade of Cobb citizens asking the judge to excuse them from jury duty on the sensational case.
Court officials have summoned 375 people to form a giant jury pool that, they hope, will yield 12 impartial jurors and some alternates to hear one of the biggest trials in recent Cobb history. Ross Harris stands charged with murder for locking his 22-month-old son, Cooper, all day in the back of a sweltering SUV in June 2014. Police and prosecutors believe that Harris killed his son deliberately; he says it was an accident.
Jury selection was to have begun on Monday, but so many potential jurors have asked to be excused that Judge Mary Staley will spend much of the trial’s first day listening to their pleas.
Cooper died on June 18, 2014 and from the beginning, the “hot car” case has been a total media magnet, a spectacle of international proportions. Judges and lawyers tend to dread such intense publicity because it can taint the jury pool in the community. That is, potential jurors may hear so much about the case that they form opinions about it long before the trial begins. So the court is looking for jurors who know little or nothing about the crime — or for people who know about the case but believe they can decide it based solely on the evidence.
Attorneys say the jurors on the Harris case can expect to spend as long as eight weeks in the courtroom, a potential hardship for many working people and parents.
Courts also have long struggled with low response from citizens called to jury duty.
Three hundred seventy-five sounds like a lot of potential jurors — and it is — but larger pools have been assembled in Georgia for sensational cases. In 2008, for example, Fulton County court officials sent out an unprecedented 3,500 summonses in the hope of finding 12 jurors and six alternates to hear the courthouse shooting murder trial of Brian Nichols.
Considering the worldwide publicity focused on the case, coupled with the low juror turnout rate, officials decided they needed to call an extraordinary number of people to be safe.
Six hundred prospective jurors were summoned for the monthslong racketeering trial of 12 former Atlanta Public Schools administrators and teachers. It took six weeks to find 12 jurors and 11 alternates to hear the test-cheating case.
Interest in the Harris case has been intense during the nearly two years between Cooper’s death and his father’s trial. First it was the shock of the little boy’s death. Then there were reports that Harris had visited websites for parents who wanted to live a “child-free” life. Police said Harris also sent sexually explicit text messages to six women, including an underage girl, even as his son was dying in the car.
Harris has insisted that he loved his son and that he simply forgot the child was in the Hyundai. Father and son had gone to breakfast at a Chick-fil-A less than a mile from Harris' web-development job at the Home Depot headquarters. Instead of taking Cooper to his nearby daycare, Harris drove to the parking lot at Home Depot, parked the SUV with Cooper still inside, and went in to work. He claims to have discovered his son's body nearly seven hours later, after he left work to drive to a movie.
Correction
This article initially said that the court had called 550 people to serve in the jury pool for the Harris case. That number referred to the total number of prospective jurors summoned to Cobb County Superior Court this week (for all cases). The number called for the Harris case was about 375.
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