BRUNSWICK — After deliberating for three hours Tuesday — and then knocking off early so they could vote — the jurors in the Justin Ross Harris murder case will have their first full day of deliberations today.
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Among the first items on the agenda: a review of the video of Harris’s interview with Cobb County police Det. Phil Stoddard just a few hours after Harris pulled his dead son out of his SUV. The prosecution has asserted that Harris’s behavior at the scene and then later at police headquarters was suspicious.
(Harris is facing many decades in prison.)
Harris seemed to switch from anguish to calm — to the point that detectives said his weeping and outcries didn’t seem genuine. The defense ridiculed those statements at trial.
“Everything Ross said was suspicious. Everything he didn’t say was suspicious. Everything he did was suspicious. Everything he didn’t do was suspicious,” said lead defense attorney Maddox Kilgore during his closing argument.
The prosecution quoted an officer at the scene who described Harris as acting like “Will Farrell. Yelling a lot then he’s calm and looking around. That’s what we saw in that interview room,” said lead prosecutor Chuck Boring.
Harris is charged with eight counts in the death of 22-month-old Cooper, including three separate counts of murder.
The jury began its work under a daunting pile of paper on Tuesday: the lengthy charge from the judge instructing them on the law in this long and complicated case, and roughly 1,150 exhibits of evidence: 950 of those came from the prosecution and 200 from the defense.
Jurors on Tuesday asked Judge Mary Staley Clark to provide the transcript of Stoddard’s interview with Harris; she would not supply the transcript but said the jury could watch the video of the interview this morning.
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