Court upholds verdict, sentence

A Portland woman’s murder conviction has been upheld by the state’s highest court.

Indiana Supreme Court affirmed Chelsea Crossland’s conviction and life without parole sentence April 23 for killing her 5-year-old son.

The decision was released this week.

Crossland was found guilty July 19, 2023, by a Jay Circuit Court jury of neglecting a dependent resulting in death and murder, with the jury also recommending imprisonment for life without parole.

Details presented during the trial indicated Crossland starved and beat her son, Christian, over the course of 74 days. An autopsy showed Christian suffered from dehydration, malnourishment and blunt force trauma.

Crossland filed an appeal with Indiana Supreme Court in September 2023. Arguments were presented in court March 6 of this year, with the court issuing its unanimous opinion April 23.

“Indeed, overwhelming evidence supports Crossland’s guilt,” wrote Justice Geoffrey G. Slaughter in the court’s opinion document. “The evidence shows that Christian died after his mother beat him, confined him to her bedroom, made him sleep on her closet floor, let him out only to use the bathroom, did not feed him herself, and did not allow her other children to feed him. When Christian died, his withered body weighed twenty pounds, leading a doctor to conclude he had gone without food for 74 days before succumbing. There is no reasonable doubt that Crossland murdered Christian.”

According to the court’s opinion document, Crossland argued the trial court denied her an impartial jury and violated her constitutional right to present a complete defense.

Crossland argued in her appeal “negative pretrial publicity poisoned the jury pool, thus requiring that she be tried in a different venue,” according to court documents. (Her requests for a change of venue prior to the July 2023 trial were denied.) She also argued she should have been able to make a peremptory challenge — an objection to a proposed juror — on a juror she found objectionable. 

Indiana Supreme Court justices found both arguments failed, citing for the former there was “no evidence the jury was unable to render an impartial verdict.” For the latter, justices said Crossland had already exhausted her allotted peremptory challenges on six other prospective jurors.

The court found that while there was prejudicial pretrial publicity, jurors agreed to judge Crossland impartially despite exposure to it. The court noted “a general atmosphere of prejudice throughout the community” may overcome presumptions about jurors staying true to their word.

“But Crossland’s case is a far cry from those truly rare cases where a community’s bias was so strong as to leave jurors unable to render an impartial verdict,” wrote Slaughter.

Crossland also shared concerns about witness Nicholas Riddle, who is the father of two of her children. She said the trial court “committed reversible error in denying [her] the ability to impeach” Riddle, court documents say. Crossland argued excluding impeachment evidence infringed on her Fourteenth Amendment and Sixth Amendment constitutional rights.

“The trial court did not err because the constitution does not give Crossland an unlimited right to introduce whatever evidence she wants,” Slaughter wrote. “Besides, on this record, any evidence in excluding this evidence was harmless. Evidence of Crossland’s guilt was overwhelming, and the excluded out-of-court statements by Riddle would not have created reasonable doubt of Crossland’s guilt.”