Justin Ross Harris: To friends and family he was a loving husband and doting father. But prosecutors say his desire to shed the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood led Harris to plan and carry out the murder of his 22-month-old son, Cooper. Before his arrest, Harris, 35, had never been in trouble with the law and at one time worked as a 911 dispatcher in Alabama. He was raised in the Tuscaloosa area and graduated from the University of Alabama. He accepted a job as a web developer with Home Depot in 2012 and moved to Marietta with his wife and their newborn son. Harris had been held in the Cobb County Jail (and then the Glynn County Jail) since the day Cooper died, June 18, 2014. The prosecution showed Harris to be obsessed with sex, trying at all hours of the day and night to arrange liaisons with multiple partners on social media. He sent images of his genitals to women he didn’t know, including underage girls, and asked for their photos in return. He decided not to testify in his own defense.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Leanna Taylor: Born and raised about an hour outside of Tuscaloosa, Leanna was set up on a blind date with Ross Harris in 2004, after which Ross Harris told friends he was “going to marry that girl.” The two did marry in 2006. Even as detail after detail about Ross’s sordid extramarital sex life emerged, in the weeks after Cooper’s death, Leanna continued to stand by her husband. She was granted a divorce early this year but still testified in her ex-husband’s defense. Taylor — she now goes by her maiden name — remains convinced that her son’s death was an accident, but she made it clear how she feels about her ex: “He destroyed my life,” Taylor said before leaving the witness stand in tears. “I’m humiliated. I may never trust anyone again the way that I did. If I never see him again in my life, that’s fine.”
Credit: KDJOHNSON@AJC.COM
Credit: KDJOHNSON@AJC.COM
Maddox Kilgore: Harris’s lead defense attorney once worked as a prosecutor in the Cobb district attorney’s office. Early in his career, Kilgore worked in the criminal division of the state attorney general’s office, representing the state in criminal appeals. “I got to go to state prisons all over the state, up in the mountains, down in the swamps. If someone was trying to get out of jail on a technicality, I had to keep him in,” he said during a talk earlier this year at Kennesaw State University. He then prosecuted felony cases in the Cobb DA’s office for six years before moving over to the defense bar in 2005. From Kilgore’s closing argument:
He failed. He left him in that car. ... He is responsible. Only him. Nobody else. And he has acknowledged that from Day One. He is responsible. But responsible is not the same thing as criminal. It is not.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Chuck Boring: The senior assistant district attorney in Cobb headed the prosecution team in the Harris case. Boring has been a prosecutor for 15 years, focusing on crimes against children. He was raised in Griffin and began practicing law as a prosecutor in Coweta County, first moving to the Fulton County DA’s office and then to Cobb. He now heads the Cobb DA’s Special Victims Unit. Boring is recognized even by his adversaries as relentless and effective on cross-examination. From Boring’s closing argument:
Right here right now, let's get back to what this case is about. This case is about justice and it's about that little boy, Cooper Harris. Today that little boy would be 4 years old in pre-K, maybe learning how to play tee-ball. But he's not. He's not here with us because that defendant took him. That defendant took his life for his own selfish, obsessed reasons.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Phil Stoddard: The Cobb County police detective was the lead investigator in the Harris case. Stoddard joined the Cobb County Police Department in 2007 after six years with Atlanta police. He had worked in the CCPD’s crimes against persons unit for about seven months when he caught the Harris case. He was a critically important witness for the prosecution in multiple pretrial hearings and, because of that testimony, emerged as a key component of the defense’s case. The defense claimed that he focused on Harris from the beginning, going so far as to exaggerate or even fabricate testimony implicating the defendant in his son’s death. He did change certain points of his testimony and some other points were refuted by other witnesses. But he stuck to his main theory of the case — that Harris killed Cooper intentionally so Harris would be free to pursue sexual liaisons with multiple partners — under a withering cross-examination by Kilgore.
Credit: KDJOHNSON@AJC.COM
Credit: KDJOHNSON@AJC.COM
Mary Staley Clark: The Cobb Superior Court judge presided over the trial of Ross Harris, including the false start in April. Staley Clark is a former assistant district attorney in Cobb who ruled in the prosecution’s favor on most of the important issues in the Harris case. In Marietta in April, she called off the trial even though three weeks of jury selection was almost finished. She had approved several prospective jurors to whom the defense objected. The objections stood even after those people were empaneled, and Staley Clark eventually instructed the state and the defense to work out a compromise on who to strike and who to keep. They couldn’t agree, and Staley Clark said she had no choice but to grant a change of venue motion. The trial moved to Brunswick and was delayed for five months.
