On Sept. 5, a grand jury indicted Justin Ross Harris on eight different counts, three months after Justin’s left his 22-month-old son, Cooper, inside the car on a summer day in Marietta, Georgia.
Some call Cooper’s death a tragic accident. Others call it a murder. Over the last three months, numerous news sources, including CNN, NBC and The Atlanta Journal Constitution, have discussed the known facts of the case. All depict Justin as an unfaithful husband seeking a childless-life.
The facts in the news articles are incriminating. Both Justin and his wife, Leanna, conducted Google searches on child deaths inside vehicles. Justin also searched how to survive in prison. While Cooper baked in the back seat of Justin’s SUV, Justin sexted six women. When Leanna arrived at the daycare to pick up Cooper and found out that he never arrived, she said she thought her husband left Cooper in the car. When she saw Harris at the police station, her first words were, “Did you say too much?”
Harder to find are articles presenting any defense of Justin. An AP article released Wednesday titled “Father accused of murdering his son by leaving his 22-month-old son in hot car will not face death penalty” depicts both sides of the case. In the article, friends of the family claim Justin and Leanna were nice, loving and proud parents. Justin claims that the searches about child deaths in vehicles resulted from fear that it would happen to Cooper. The AP reports that Justin brought a colleague and friend to the car in the middle of the day, which the defense claims as evidence. Witnesses said that he “appeared to be extremely upset” when he found his son’s body. Cooper’s death could have been accidental. A March 2009 Washington Post article states, “According to statistics compiled by a national children’s safety advocacy group, in about 40 percent of cases authorities examine the evidence, determine that the child’s death was a terrible accident – a mistake of memory that delivers a lifelong sentence of guilt far greater than any a judge or jury could mete out – and file no charges.”
This editorial board does not wish to determine Justin’s guilt or innocence; that is the duty of the jury. Instead, we will focus on the consequences of media coverage on high profile cases, such as the Harris case.
The media is often the only source of information about these cases for the public, so the public only gets what information the media is given. But the public also gets fed opinions. Commentators re-hash the known facts and offer their own assessments. Taken as a whole, news sources and commentators sway their audiences one way or the other. That’s part of the reason jurors in high profile cases are often not allowed to watch or read any news or browse social media.
High profile cases end up undergoing two trials: the public trial conducted by the media and the masses and the official trial conducted by the U.S. judicial system. The verdicts of the two trials don’t always match. Yet a July 2013 Slate article states, “studies suggest that juries reach the correct verdict between 75 and 90 percent of the time.” Regardless of our personal opinions, we have to hope that each case is part of the percentage that juries get correct.