Justin Ross Harris, Georgia man convicted in baby son's hot-car death, asks Supreme Court to overturn ruling

The Georgia man whose toddler son died after he left the boy in a hot car for hours is appealing his conviction to the state Supreme Court, arguing that prosecutors presented "an avalanche" of inappropriate evidence before the jury, which ultimately found him guilty of murder and child cruelty, among other charges, according to records and a report. 

"The sexual messaging acts did not make it more probable that Mr. Harris would intentionally kill his child," Harris’s attorney, Mitch Durham, told the Georgia Supreme Court during the Tuesday morning hearing, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. 

Harris, who moved from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to the Atlanta area for work in 2012, told police he forgot to drop his son off at day care on the morning of June 18, 2014, driving straight to his job as a web developer for Home Depot without remembering that Cooper was still in his car seat.

Cooper died after sitting for about seven hours in the back seat of the vehicle outside his father's office in suburban Atlanta, where temperatures that day reached at least into the high 80s.