Lawyers make final case to jury in hot-car murder trial

BRUNSWICK, Ga. ( AP) — Prosecutors and defense attorneys making final arguments to a Georgia jury Monday agreed on one thing: that when Justin Ross Harris arrived at work more than two years ago and locked his car, his toddler son was left behind in the back seat and suffered a slow and agonizing death.

The question for the jury to decide is why that happened. In closing arguments Monday, Harris' defense attorney said his client was "clueless" and forgetful. But a prosecutor called Harris a murderer with a "malignant heart" who killed his child to escape his family commitments as he sank deeper into a double life of sexual flirting and affairs with women he met online.

"It's not a case of an adult hating his child," prosecutor Chuck Boring told the jury. "It's just that he loved himself and his other obsessions more than that little boy."

Harris left his 22-month-old son, Cooper, strapped into his car seat in the back of his SUV on June 18, 2014. The boy was dead when his father pulled him from the vehicle more than seven hours later. He told police he took his son to breakfast that morning and then drove straight to work, forgetting to take the child to day care.

Harris' defense attorney, Maddox Kilgore, told jurors that police rushed to judgment in concluding a crime had been committed and then used evidence of Harris' affairs outside his marriage "to essentially bury him in a mountain of his own sexual sins." He insisted the child's death was unrelated.

"If it's an accident, it's not a crime," Kilgore said. "He is responsible. Only him. Nobody else. And he has acknowledged that from day one. But responsible is not the same thing as criminal."

The jurors heard nearly five hours of closing arguments in total from both sides. Once they receive legal instructions from the judge, they can begin deliberating.

The arguments capped more than a month of courtroom testimony in coastal Brunswick, where Harris' trial was moved from the Atlanta suburb of Cobb County because of pretrial publicity. A native of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Harris moved to Georgia in 2012.

Boring told the jury it's impossible to believe Harris forgot about his son. The drive from the Chick-fil-A restaurant where they ate breakfast was less than a mile from the Home Depot office where Harris worked as a web developer. Cooper's car seat faced backward, but was secured in the middle of the back seats just inches from Harris.