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Jason T. Harris (WDIV screenshot)

Jason T. Harris (WDIV screenshot)

An appeals court in Michigan has upheld the murder conviction of a man who killed his wife by intentionally spiking her cereal with a lethal dose of heroin just months after their second child was born. A three-judge panel of the State of Michigan Court of Appeals on Friday unanimously rejected the request of Jason T. Harris to have his conviction overturned due to ineffective assistance of counsel, reasoning that there was “overwhelming evidence” of his guilt and the “sheer fiendishness of his actions.”

As previously reported by Law&Crime, a jury in November 2021 found Harris guilty on one count each of first-degree murder, solicitation of murder, and delivery of a controlled substance resulting in death for causing Christina Ann-Thompson’s 2014 overdose.

The appeals court

According to the court’s opinion, Harris’ defense attorney made a critical error by not consulting or calling a toxicology expert to refute the state’s evidence showing Harris’ wife orally ingested a fatal amount of heroin.

“By not consulting an expert (or conducting any independent investigation into the basis for the prosecution’s expert’s testimony), Harris’s lawyer remained unaware of the possibility of either presenting his own witness to counter the prosecution’s experts or cross-examining the prosecution’s witnesses based upon information he learned from either an independent investigation or the consultation with his own expert,” the opinion states. “We conclude that his decision was objectively unreasonable.”

However, the panel further reasoned that despite his attorney’s error, Harris failed to establish that there was a “reasonable probability” the jury would have found him not guilty, which is the standard for overturning a conviction based on ineffective assistance of counsel. The panel concluded that while such evidence could “possibly have affected the jury verdict,” the “overwhelming evidence of guilt and the sheer fiendishness” of Harris’ actions meant there was not a “reasonable probability” that the jury was likely to reach a different conclusion.

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