Jean Harris - Legal Defense and Trial

Legal Defense and Trial

Harris was released on $40,000 bail raised by her brother and sisters and signed into the United Hospital of Port Chester for psychiatric evaluation and therapy. She then contracted the services of attorney Joel Aurnou to plan her defense.

The case went to trial on November 21, 1980, and lasted 14 weeks, becoming one of the longest in state history. The New York press sensationalized the trial and made Harris a household name from coast to coast. Harris took the stand and testified at length in her own defense, but the jury rejected her story that the shooting had been accidental, and convicted her of second-degree murder.

With the guilty verdict, Harris was not legally eligible to inherit $220,000 Tarnower had left her in his will.

Harris has consistently maintained that she did not intentionally kill Tarnower. Joel Aurnou would later state that he encouraged his client to plead guilty to a lesser charge, but she refused. Judge Russell R. Leggett ordered her confined to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in Westchester County, New York, for the minimum of 15 years to life. Numerous appeals followed the conviction, but the higher courts determined that she had received a fair trial.

Because the defense had hoped for a complete acquittal, the jury was not offered the option of finding Harris guilty of first-degree manslaughter — the mercy option — and the mental health professionals who tested and treated Harris were not called to testify.

While serving her sentence, Harris made it her mission to improve the education of female inmates in her facility. She began programs in which women could work toward obtaining their GEDs or college degrees while imprisoned. She also taught a parenting class to inmates and developed the in-prison nursery for babies born to inmates.

Eleven years after Harris's conviction, Governor Mario Cuomo commuted the remainder of her sentence on December 29, 1992, as she was being prepped for quadruple bypass heart surgery. She was released from prison by the parole board and initially planned to live in a cabin in New Hampshire, but later moved to the Whitney Center, a retirement home in Hamden, Connecticut, where she currently resides.

After her release, Harris visited Tarnower's grave at Mount Hope Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson on multiple occasions.