This is a running account of the Justin Ross Harris murder trial. Harris stands accused of intentionally leaving his 22-month-old son Cooper to die in a hot SUV for 7 hours on June 18, 2014.
The defense has a handful of witnesses left to call before wrapping up its case likely early next week.
The trial is set to resume around 8:45 or 9 a.m. this morning.
Superior Court Judge Mary Staley Clark adjourns court for the day.
The defense is likely to wrap up its case tomorrow, unless Harris testifies. Kilgore, however, seemed to indicate this afternoon that is unlikely.
Closing arguments then could begin Monday.
Court will resume tomorrow at 8:30 a.m.
The court is taking a lunch break.
Boring is now asking Brewer questions again.
Can people be so negligent that they self-inflict memory lapses? Boring said. Harris was staying up to all hours of the night sexting women, he pointed out.
I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of what’s going on here, Brewer said.
“He didn’t choose to be tired. He didn’t choose to be negligent,” he said. But that doesn’t mean he knew what dire consequences there could be, Brewer said.
Is it possible to have a memory failure without having any distractions at all? Kilgore said.
Yes, Brewer testified.
Even under best case scenario performance is not perfect, Brewer said.
When a person is having a stressful experience, there is a direct impact on memory, Brewer said.
Would you agree losing your child and getting arrested was a stressful environment? Kilgore asked. Yes, Brewer responded.
Brewer said he couldn’t find anything in Harris’ day that would have signaled to the dad something was amiss.
Harris is smart; he’s college educated, Kilgore said. Yes, Harris would be classified as high in general intellectual abilities, Brewer said.
“Are smart people immune from these kinds of memory failures,” Kilgore said.
No, Brewer said. “That makes them in no way immune to them forgetting…The very best of us are not immune from having failures in anything that we do.”
Kilgore is now re-examining the witness.
Do you remember everything that we provided you in this case? Kilgore asked Brewer. No, he said.
“Did we provide anything and everything you asked for?” Kilgore said. Yes, Brewer responded.
Kilgore pointed out that Brewer also talked with and received materials from the prosecution.
If Harris would have spent less time sexting, then he could have gotten more sleep and spent more time on his work if he was worried about it, Boring said. Brewer agreed.
Boring asked if Brewer knew about Harris multiple times messaging people in the middle of the night on June 15. No, Brewer replied.
On June 16, Harris again was messaging in the wee hours of the morning. It was the same the following day on the 17th.
In each of these instances, Boring points out that Harris was more awake than the morning of June 18.
“He actually got more sleep on the 18th” than the previous few days, Boring said. “Absolutely,” maybe because he was fatigued, Brewer said.
Were you aware that Harris said he would take Cooper two to three times a month for a daddy-son breakfast? Boring said. Yes, Brewer said.
Leanna and workers at the daycare also said that Harris went to Chick-fil-A with Cooper. On the days Harris went with Cooper to Chick-fil-A first, daycare workers said the toddler would be awake. Brewer said he wasn’t aware of that.
“You didn’t talk to these witnesses. You just had what the defense gave you,” Boring said.
Brewer said he only knew information given to him by the defense but also the prosecution.
In terms of fatigue, Harris never claimed he was sleepy, Boring pointed out. No one said he looked sleepy, either.
There is certain evidence that the defendant could have been fatigued, including sleeping 5 to 6 hours and being unshaven, Brewer said.
Credit: WSB-TV
Credit: WSB-TV
"In a case like this, you want to look at the whole picture,” Boring said.
Were you aware that Harris told the police he wasn’t stressed, didn’t mention a lack of sleep, said he wasn’t distracted, Boring said.
“I’m not aware of the evidence that’s been presented in court,” Brewer answered.
Cues are always helpful, Brewer said.
That would include sight and smell, Boring said. What about if it’s closer to you? Not necessarily, Brewer said.
His Chick-fil-A cup could be a cue. But how he interprets that cup determines how useful the cue is, Brewer said. If you don’t relate it to dropping off at the day care, so it’s not as effective as a cue, he said.
Going back to your car could be a cue, Boring said. Yes, Brewer said.
Responding to a message talking about your son while you’re still in the car, that could be a cue, Boring said. Yes, Brewer said.
Boring asks: If there is a shorter in duration distance or time, does that make it less likely to have a memory failure than a longer time?
That’s not a question you can have a yes or no answer to, Brewer said. “There’s lots of factors that are at play when you’re thinking about time and memory,” he said.
Brewer said earlier that the scientific community interacts a lot.
Can age have an impact memory, Boring said.
As you age, there is a decline in cognitive function, Brewer said.
Also people who are more intelligent have better fluid memory – not just how many facts do they know but how quickly are they able to process information.
“If they’re smarter, then they’re less likely to forget,” Boring said.
Absolutely, Brewer replied.
Boring pointed out that Harris walked into the office that morning with a Chick-fil-A cup but not a bag of food like he normally would have if he had gone to the restaurant by himself.
The absence of something can be a cue, Brewer said.
David Diamond is an expert that has summarized a lot of cases of children left in cars. Brewer’s broader knowledge of the issue comes from Diamond.
Most of the times there is a memory system failure, the child is out of view, Boring pointed out. Yes, Brewer said.
Brewer said he wasn’t aware of any cases where the drive was as short as Harris’ route.
Boring pointed out that Brewer said there was nothing unique about Harris’ case. But you’ve never had a case where the parent was sexting the morning of the incident. No, Brewer said.
Boring keeps hitting at the point that Brewer doesn’t know of any cases like Harris’. He hasn’t seen a case where a parent returned to the car at lunch to throw light bulbs in, where the parent said he needed an escape from his child …
Lead prosecutor Chuck Boring is cross-examining Brewer.
Brewer is not hear to give the opinion that this particular case is due to memory systems failure, Boring said. Brewer is not a clinician, he also pointed out.
In the lab, you’re not trying to replicate forgetting something as serious as the forgetting of a child, Boring said.
There’s no way to replicate that, no, Brewer replied.
“As a researchers, you’re not going to just take somebody’s word for it,” Boring said. No, I’m going to collect data, Brewer said.
Opinion is only as good as the information it’s based on, Boring said.
If you’re given bad information, your opinions could be opposite of what you thought originally, Boring said. That’s true, Brewer replied.
Court is back in session.
Court is in recess for the morning break.
Kilgore now turns the discussion to internal distractions.
Harris had sent an email about work the previous night expressing dissatisfaction at his job performance. Cooper had woken him up early that morning. Harris was trying to start a new business with his friends.
“Are these matters which could create the kind of internal distraction that we’re talking about?” Kilgore said.
“Yes,” Brewer said.
It’s impossible, though, to know what Harris was thinking – that’s the nature of internal distraction, he said.
On the day of Cooper’s death, he had the intention of taking Cooper to daycare. But there was also routine behavior that day – going to work after picking up Chick-fil-A by himself, not with Cooper, Brewer pointed out.
Then there’s this high traffic area with lots of distractions that demands attention, he said. That's true even though Harris was used to making that U-turn.
Credit: WSB-TV
Credit: WSB-TV
Brewer is discussing Harris’ routine route to work.
“That’s a well-worn path,” Brewer said. “When I am on this road, this is naturally the way that I go.”
Cooper went to Chick-fil-A but not as much as Harris went by himself. Publix, which Harris often went to lunch, is also along that route, Brewer pointed out. So there are disproportionately more times Harris traced that path by himself – without Cooper.
“His habit would naturally be to go to (his office) in this case,” he said.
You may not even think at all about whether you dropped your child at daycare. And then if you did think about it, it may still be hard for you to reason out whether you did it or not, Brewer said.
Think about putting shampoo in your hair or brushing your teeth, you know you did it. But you’ve done it so many times, it’s hard to remember if you did it or not on any particular day.
You don’t think critically about it.
In Harris case, Harris told police that he thought Cooper was at daycare. “It’s not an issue that only happened in Ross’ case,” Brewer said. It happens to many other parents in these circumstances too.
In these cases (leaving children in cars), “generally, the parents tend to report the experience of believing that the child was taken to daycare,” Brewer said.
If you believe that, then you won’t ask questions about the cues that may pop up, he said.
Brewer said he also studies false memory.
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Credit: WSB-TV
Brewer said he’s driven Harris’ route from the Chick-fil-A to work, including the light and U-turn.
Can we have this type of memory failure in that short a period of time? Kilgore asked.
“Absolutely,” Brewer said.
We study memory in milliseconds, Brewer said.
Thirty seconds, a minute, one hour … those don’t sound like long periods of time but it is psychologically.
“Try sitting by yourself for one minute, psychologically it’s a lifetime,” Brewer said.
You’ll think of many things, you’ll have many experiences, he said.
There have been many studies looking at just how quickly people can forget their intentions.
“If you delay people even as little as 30 seconds, they forget more,” Brewer said.
He did an experiment where not only did they make people delay before they acted but they were then distracted too. People were that much more likely to forget what they had intended to do.
It can happen in a matter of seconds, Brewer said.
Brewer gives an example: you’re sitting in the living room watching TV and you want to get something out of the refrigerator. If you don’t have a cue, then you may quickly forget – walking the short distance from the living room and the kitchen – what you wanted.
“You can’t for the life of you think about what it is you went to the refrigerator to get,” Brewer said. “It’s right there looking at you in the face.”
Just because you get an email about your child or talk about your child during the day that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a powerful cue to remind you about the child. You normally do those things.
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Credit: WSB-TV
If you walk into an office or store or other place, every single step that you take you’re going to get feedback that’s different than the feedback you’d typically expect.
You’ll ask why is this different? Brewer said. “My shoe must be in the car.”
You might not even associate it with the child at that point, he said. “It’s giving you a backup, a Plan B.”
An intentional cue to prevent a memory failure in this type of situation, leaving your child in a car, would be taking your shoe off and placing it with the child, Brewer said.
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Credit: WSB-TV
There can still be lapses, however, even when factoring in the importance of a task.
“Even under the best situations and the best circumstances, there are still going to be failures,” brewer said. There’s nothing unique to this case relative to similar types of cases, he said.
There are examples of other types of situations where there have been fatal consequences.
Surgeons have left surgical instruments in patients; pilots have forgotten to put the landing gear down, Brewer said.
Cues are also important. “We’re really dependent on the environment (around us) to say now’s the time for you to behave this way,” Brewer said.
Fatigue is another thing that has a negative impact on attention and memory.
“Anything that causes some type of physical toll or mental toll, you’re probably not tip-top,” Brewer said.
You need both memory and attention to achieve prospective memory -- those goals you plan on achieving.
Prospective memory may be as small as putting an attachment on an email to a longer-term goal of meeting a new health routine.
There are two different types distraction – both external and internal.
External is what is happening in the outside world, such as loud noises. When it comes to internal, think about having an argument with a friend or family member. Afterward, you may continue to play that conversation over and your head.
“You’re having these thoughts that keep interfering with your ability to concentrate,” Brewer said.
He creates studies to test how distractions affect people’s prospective memory – achieve the goals they had planned on meeting.
“Distractions hurt prospective memory,” he said.
A phone call is a good example of an external distraction, Brewer said.
“Most of our lives, we’re engaging in just routine behavior,” that we don’t think much about, Brewer said. These are habits like brushing our teeth. If you have a goal counter to your routine behavior, frequently people will lapse into that routine and forget about what they’re pretending to do.
When you’re driving down the road, traffic may not be particularly bad you may have a moment when you think, “What have I been thinking about? What have I been doing?” Brewer said.
Driving is a routine. There’s nothing typically unusual about it unless there’s bad traffic or something out of the ordinary.
When you’re on auto pilot, it’s just mindless driving, Brewer said. “We all engage in mindless behavior.”
Brewer explains the framework of the types of memory he studies.
As a scientist you generally have one or two primary research focus areas, he said.
Brewer studies three topics. The first is working memory – your ability to actively maintain a goal or intention over some period of time in a distraction rich environment.
Secondly, Brewer studies the nature of memory – such as memory from episodes that have happened in your life versus the type of memory that allows you to remember facts, such as 2+2=4.
Lastly, he focuses on “prospective memory.” “How do you rely on past information to think about the future? How do you plan the future and when the future arrives how do you remember what it was you were planning to do,” Brewer said.
Brewer said his team has received funding for its work from several reputable institutions, including the National Science Foundation. They use money from the foundation to develop strategies to help people remember better.
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Credit: WSB-TV
Brewer said his day-to-day activities involve reading articles related to his field and discussing with students, coming up with new experiments and analyzing the data.
He usually has 20 to 30 people working in his laboratory at any given time. They recruit people to participate in a computerized task, essentially games that measure their memory and attention.
Brewer said he studies human cognition – essentially all of our abilities that we use to perceive the world and how we use that information to make decisions, be creative and other uses unique to humans.
At UGA, he was an assistant helping with studies specifically looking at how we use memory for future actions, such as setting and reaching goals.
The defense calls Dr. Gene Brewer as its first witness of the day.
He works in psychology at Arizona State University who studies human memory. He got his Ph.D. at the University of Georgia.
Trial is now in session. The defense is making sure the technology its expert plans to use while testifying is working.
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