Carmie Nelson received a life sentence in 2019 for the 2017 murder of her roommate (screengrab via WCSC). Inset: Carmie Nelson (via South Carolina Dept. of Corrections).
The conviction of a woman accused of murdering her roommate with a hammer and a knife has been overturned after a state supreme court ruled that showing “excessively gruesome” autopsy pictures at trial created the risk of a guilty verdict based on “inflamed emotions.”
Carmie Nelson was convicted in 2019 of the 2017 murder of Jordan Brooke Lum in Charleston, South Carolina. According to prosecutors, she struck Lum in the head with the hammer and then stabbed her with a knife at least 19 times. She then allegedly tried to blame Lum’s slaying on her husband Daniel Nelson, who admitted to helping his wife clean up the crime scene. At trial, over Carmie Nelson’s objections, the judge allowed prosecutors to show pictures from Lum’s autopsy, which revealed the extent of Lum’s more than 100 injuries in gruesome detail, to jurors.
Carmie Nelson was convicted of Lum’s murder and sentenced to life in prison. That conviction was upheld on appeal; citing the admission of the autopsy photos, Carmie Nelson then took the case to the South Carolina Supreme Court.
In a ruling issued Wednesday, the Palmetto State’s highest court reversed Carmie Nelson’s conviction, finding that the trial court judge should not have allowed Lum’s autopsy photos to be admitted as evidence, because the prejudicial impact of the pictures outweighed any potential relevance they had to the state’s case — even while acknowledging that there was enough evidence without the autopsy photos to justify the guilty verdict.
“The admission of these excessively gruesome autopsy photos unnecessarily created the potential for the jury to convict Carmie of the murder based on inflamed emotions in a case where the jury was provided with undisputed evidence as to how Victim died, as well as ample evidence that she had been killed with malice, whether by Carmie or Daniel,” the judges said. “The potential for a verdict based on emotion was amplified by the fact the jury was informed that Daniel had also been charged in connection with this case but only faced an accessory after the fact of murder charge.”
Noting that there was no dispute as to how the victim was killed, the judges agreed that the way Lum died was relevant to proving the malice element of the murder charge — but that prosecutors’ evidence, including testimony from medical examiner Dr. Nicholas Batalis without the autopsy photos, was enough.
“[W]e believe Dr. Batalis’s testimony as to Victim’s injuries could have properly established how Victim was killed and that Victim was killed with malice, negating the evidentiary value to be gained from the autopsy photos,” the judges wrote, noting that prosecutors had established the malice element in other ways, including the defendant’s “disparaging texts” about Lum days before she was killed, testimony that Carmie Nelson had asked her husband to harass and assault Lum, and a recording Daniel Nelson took of his wife “saying she attacked Victim while she was on the couch and kept beating her after she fell to the ground.”
The fact that the medical examiner testified that he believed the autopsy pictures would better help the jury understand Lum’s injuries wasn’t enough, the judges found.
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“[W]e believe an average juror could understand just from Dr. Batalis’s testimony that Victim died as a result of being bludgeoned in the head with a hammer, having her throat cut, and being stabbed multiple times in the chest,” they wrote.
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According to the opinion, prosecutors didn’t need to show the photos in order to prove their case that Carmie Nelson, and not Daniel Nelson, killed Lum.
“[W]e note these photos provide no insight as to who killed Victim,” the opinion says. “In this instance, where the photos were not needed to prove an issue in the case, the State should have heeded our warning in [another case] to resist pushing the envelope on admissibility to gain a victory which was likely already assured.”
Daniel Nelson pleaded guilty to accessary after the fact of murder, and was sentenced to five years in prison.
Read the Supreme Court’s ruling, below.
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