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Man convicted of murder in hot car death to be sentenced
Convicted father will get chance to address judge
W dad
In this Nov. 14 file photo, Justin Ross Harris sits with his defense team in the Glynn County Courthouse in Brunswick, Ga. Harris, whose toddler son died after being left for hours in a hot car, was convicted of murder by a jury that concluded a month's worth of trial testimony and evidence showed the father left his child to perish on purpose. - photo by Associated Press
ATLANTA — A judge is set to sentence a Georgia man Monday after a jury last month found that he intentionally left his toddler son in a hot SUV to die.A jury convicted Justin Ross Harris, 36, in the June 2014 death of his 22-month-old son, Cooper.Police were suspicious from the start and took Harris into custody in the strip mall parking lot where he had pulled over and removed his son's lifeless body from the SUV. Harris' defense attorneys argued that he was a loving father and that while he was responsible for the boy's death, it was a tragic accident.Harris' defense team vowed after the trial to appeal the verdict and to seek a new trial.Here are some things to know before his sentencing:THE DEATHCooper died after sitting for about seven hours in the back seat of his father's vehicle outside the office where Harris worked in suburban Atlanta on a day when temperatures reached at least into the high 80s.Harris said he forgot to drop his son off at day care that morning, driving straight to his job as a web developer for Home Depot, not remembering that Cooper was still in his car seat.Investigators found evidence that Harris was engaging in online flirting and in-person affairs with numerous women other than his wife, including a prostitute and an underage teenager. They concluded that Harris intentionally killed his son to escape the responsibilities of family life.Harris had moved from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to Georgia for work in 2012.THE TRIALHarris' case received an enormous amount of media attention from the very beginning. The Atlanta media market was saturated with coverage, and it also made national headlines and was fodder for online discussions and cable news shows.After determining during nearly three weeks of jury selection in April that pretrial publicity had made it too difficult to find a fair jury in Cobb County, where the boy died, Superior Court Judge Mary Staley Clark granted a defense request to relocate the trial.A jury in Glynn County, located on the Georgia coast about 60 miles south of Savannah, spent about a month listening to evidence in the case and deliberated for four days before finding him guilty last month of all eight counts against him.
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