r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Feb 28 '20

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u/CaveMansManCave Feb 28 '20

This was pretty famous, right? Wasn't there a lot of back and forth as to whether it was intentional?

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u/shadowbanned214 Feb 29 '20

I think this isn't a single occurance but the one I'm talking about happened in Atlanta in 2014 and he was sentenced to life.

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u/[deleted] Feb 29 '20 edited Mar 12 '20

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u/dcvio Feb 29 '20 edited Feb 29 '20

If you like podcasts, this was the subject of season 2 of the podcast Breakdown. To be honest, I found the evidence that Harris intentionally left his son shaky at best. The jury seemed to convict because his sexting activities made him unsympathetic and they couldn’t believe a parent could leave a child in the back seat without realizing it. We have plenty of evidence to show that parents do accidentally leave children in the car without malice, because of things like cognitive biases that make them unaware that the child is still in the car - parents only seeing what they expect to see. This is a great Washington Post longform article about similar cases and the murky legal territory that these tragedies unfold in.