Nancy Grace and her self-named show may only have about a week left on the air at HLN.
But it seems the feisty former Atlanta prosecutor isn’t about to bow out quietly. Especially not when it comes to the Justin Ross Harris “Hot Car Death” trial.
“I find it very ironic that Justin Ross Harris started crying over his defense lawyer’s opening statement, since it’s (been) stated over and over that when he realized that his son was dead, he never shed a tear,” Grace said Wednesday on Good Morning America.
Harris is charged with murdering his 22-month-old son, Cooper, by leaving him to die in a hot SUV in June 2014. Grace, 56, announced last summer that she'd soon end the popular 8 p.m. show she's hosted for a dozen years, where she's covered legal matters and tirelessly advocated for crime victims.
The last “Nancy Grace” will air Oct. 13. Until then, Grace appears about as hot on the case as she was last spring when Harris’s trial originally got underway in Cobb County.
A change of venue motion by the defense was ultimately granted and testimony finally began in front of a new jury in Brunswick on Tuesday morning. Hours later, ""Nancy Grace" rebroadcast a special that first ran back in April — "Hot Car Death Trial: Mistake or Murder?" — in which the host repeatedly referred to Harris as "Daddy."
MORE: HLN's Nancy Grace to cover Georgia's Hot Car Death trial almost non-stop
Grace plans to cover the trial on Wednesday night’s show, according to an HLN spokeswoman, who also said the Atlanta-based cable network has a producer/correspondent in Brunswick providing updates during the day as news warrants. On GMA Wednesday morning, Grace spent some three minutes assessing trial developments and strategy — including the significance of Harris’s reported sexting with women other than his then-wife, Leanna.
"Do I like that? No, I want to hold my nose at it," Grace said during the live shot from Atlanta. "But that does not a murder make. What will be more probitive … is if they can actually prove what has been alleged in some of these search warrants, that (Harris) had been searching for 'How long does it take an animal, or a dog, to die in a hot car.'"
The mother of twins seemed less understanding of Harris’s claim that he forgot all about Cooper and left him in the car after the two had breakfasted together at Chick-fil-A.
"I drove that exact drive that he took that morning," Grace told GMA host Amy Robach. "He went into Chick-fil-A with his son, not (through) a drive-thru. They all saw Cooper happy, laughing. He put him back in the car. He had less than two minutes to drive! What, he forgot his son was alive in those two minutes? How can that be? It can't."
And with Harris’s ex-wife, Leanna Taylor, reportedly expected to testify that she believes Cooper’s death was an accident, Grace had some advice for the prosecutors about calling her to the stand: Don’t.
“If you let the defense call her, then you’ll have her on cross examination,” said Grace, who moved into TV fulltime after nearly a decade as a prosecutor in Fulton County. “She says she doesn’t think this was intentional, that it was an accident, that her husband who she knows so well would never have done that. Well? Did she know that he was with hookers? Did she know that he was cheating?
"If she didn't know that much, how does she know that he won't lie to save his own skin?" Grace concluded. "That's what I would argue."
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