Supreme Court rejects Gillette murder appeal

GILLETTE — A Gillette man’s appeal of his murder conviction has failed.

In September 2017, Joseph Nielsen was convicted of abusing and killing his girlfriend’s three-year-old son, Caiden Fedora. In January, District Judge Michael N. “Nick” Deegan sentenced Nielsen to life in prison.

Nielsen, 23, appealed the ruling based on what his attorneys believed to be improper testimony by the prosecution’s expert witnesses and improper questioning of the defense’s expert witness.

They claimed the prosecution used expert witnesses to get around proving Nielsen abused the boy. Instead of using them to “establish facts necessary to support the legal finding of child abuse, the state chose” to use the experts to tell the jury that child abuse was present, his attorneys wrote.

“The state, through the use of its numerous expert witnesses, sidestepped the necessity of proving Mr. Nielsen intentionally or recklessly inflicted physical injury on [Caiden Fedora] by directly informing the jury on countless occasions that the sub-crime of child abuse had been proven,” the defense wrote earlier this year.

But the Wyoming Supreme Court disagreed, saying that while the expert testimony had a “devastating impact” on Nielsen’s case, it only explained the meaning and significance of medical evidence to the jury.

“They used accepted methods of observation, multi-disciplinary information gathering and inferential and deductive reasoning to arrive at their diagnoses,” Supreme Court Justice Kate Fox wrote. “That those diagnoses happened to contain terms with distinct legal meanings does not equate to expressing an opinion as to Mr. Nielsen’s guilt.”

Nielsen’s appeal also claimed the prosecution improperly questioned the defense’s expert witness, Dr. Thomas Young, in cross-examination. Young, the defense’s sole expert witness, was the only person who could have corroborated Nielsen’s story.

The prosecution directly quoted two court opinions from trials Young had testified in, both of which did not paint him in a positive light. This prevented Nielsen from having a fair trial, his appeal claimed.

The Supreme Court pointed out that over the course of the trial, the prosecution presented “ample evidence” that the boy’s injuries were consistent with child abuse, and it also attacked Young’s credibility by questioning his research process ahead of the trial.

“We cannot conclude that there was a reasonable probability the outcome would have been more favorable… had the State not asked the two challenged questions,” Fox wrote.