WARNER ROBINS, Ga. — A former Houston County bus driver convicted of causing an accident that killed a 6-year-old girl wants the state supreme court to throw out her conviction.
The court is scheduled to take up Shalita Harris’s case this week.
In 2018, authorities said Harris was driving at dangerous speeds when her bus overturned, killing Arlana Haynes and injuring several others.
A sign on Forrest Park Drive cautions drivers to take the curve at 15 mph, but attorney David Dozier, who represented the mother of the 6-year-old killed in the bus accident, says Shalita Harris was traveling faster than that.
"This wasn’t the first day this lady took these actions either, with all those children, and this was the first time it blew up on her," he said.
Harris was convicted of reckless driving and vehicular homicide.
Now, she is asking the state Supreme Court for a new trial, arguing jurors searching online for information about her possible sentence. Dozier says it's unlikely Harris will get a new trial.
"The issue at hand, of course, is what do you do about jurors and their ability to research right in the palm of their hand?" Dozier said.
“I think increasingly what we’re seeing is jurors will access the internet to kind of sense what’s going on in the case or the law in the area," Mercer Law professor David Oedel explained.
He says jurors shouldn’t have outside influence but in this case, jurors may have felt they needed extra guidance.
"What the jurors were looking at in this case was the difference between first and second degree vehicular homicide and what the penalty might be for that,” Oedel said.
The professor says Harris could have a chance to overturn her conviction.
"I would ordinarily say this is a tough case to make, but I think in this case, she's got a shot," Oedel said.
Dozier disagrees.
"When you’ve got someone collecting evidence that fast and video evidence of what occurred, what could the internet possibly add to it that would make a decision about whether or not the person was guilty or innocent?" Dozier said.
Dozier says he and his legal team has completed litigation with the Houston county school district but are still suing Blue Bird, the manufacturer of the bus.
The Georgia Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in the Harris case Wednesday in Atlanta.