Cobb County police Det. Phil Stoddard did battle for four hours Tuesday with Justin Ross Harris's defense attorney, and the cross-examination will continue as court resumes this morning.
Attorney Maddox Kilgore continually probed for weaknesses in Stoddard’s case against Harris, eliciting concessions from Stoddard that previous statements and allegations by police — and by Stoddard in particular — were unfounded or only partially correct.
Stoddard returns to the stand this morning in the hot-car death trial. His cross-examination by Kilgore may prove to be a pivotal moment in the longrunning trial.
Here are five issues that emerged in Tuesday’s testimony:
1. Stoddard, the lead detective, admitted that Harris had not searched for a video on animals trapped in hot cars, as police had previously asserted.
2. He would not back down from his claim that Harris sought out a web page on the virtues of a child-free lifestyle. This despite testimony last week by a coworker of Harris at Home Depot that he sent a link to the site to Harris and that Harris viewed the site briefly before responding, "Grossness."
3. Stoddard also admitted that he had not fully read a report written by a consultant that the police hired to examine Harris's web searches. Nor, he said, did he speak with the consultant about his findings.
4. Kilgore insisted that Stoddard ignored evidence that did not support his thesis: that Harris deliberately killed his son, Cooper, by leaving him in a hot SUV to die in June 2014. For example, Stoddard conceded that he had not interviewed a travel agent who was helping Harris plan a family cruise. Would a man who was planning to kill his son spend part of the day before the murder planning a family cruise? Kilgore asked.
5. Stoddard backed off another key allegation, that Harris should have noticed his son's body in the car the moment Harris got into the driver's seat — rather than appearing to discover the body a couple of miles down the road — because the stench of decomposition permeated the vehicle. The detective conceded Tuesday that Harris may not have smelled such an odor. Experts have said it was too early for decomposition to have begun.
The trial is scheduled to resume today at 8:30 a.m. The AJC will cover the proceedings with breaking-news reports during the day and also a minute-by-minute file commencing as soon as court reconvenes.
You can follow minute-by-minute trial developments at AJC.com and on Twitter at @AJCBreakdown and at AJC.com. AJC reporters Christian Boone (@reporterJCB) and Bill Rankin (@ajccourts) will be in Brunswick for the duration of the trial.
Harris is also the subject of the second season of the AJC's podcast series "Breakdown,"which will follow the trial's developments.
