The Supreme Judicial Court rejected an appeal Thursday from a Cambridge man convicted of choking a friend to death in April 2015 and dismembering the victim’s body, leaving the body parts in bags on an East Cambridge walkway and in trash areas in the assailant’s apartment building.
Carlos Colina, 32 at the time of the murder, was found guilty in 2018 of killing Jonathan Camilien, then 26, of Somerville, and is serving a sentence of life without parole. The two men got into a drunken argument in Colina’s apartment at 157 Sixth St., prosecutors said. Colina killed Camilien by putting him in a chokehold, then dismembered the body and cut up Camilien’s credit cards and identification documents.
Police discovered the murder after a Biogen security worker reported a suspicious duffel bag on Officer William Loughrey Walkway, a bicycle and pedestrian path near the company’s office. Inside was Camilien’s torso. Security video led officers to Colina’s building, where they found bags in a trash room with other body parts and the torn-up cards.
At his trial, Colina admitted killing Camilien but said the victim had attacked him as the two men argued heatedly over rap music, and he feared for his life. Colina said he didn’t call police because he thought they wouldn’t believe the death was an accident. He testified that he dismembered Camilien’s body because he couldn’t fit the whole thing into one bag.
Colina contended in his appeal that the judge in his trial wrongly allowed rap lyrics that he had written describing murder by choking and subsequent dismemberment to be introduced at the trial, despite his testimony that he wrote the rap songs years before the murder of Camilien. Similarly, he said records of his online purchases of a handsaw, pliers and rope used in the crime, also made years before the murder, should not have been introduced in his trial. Colina also argued that the judge did not give required jury instructions and the prosecutor misrepresented Colina’s testimony in her closing argument.
“We conclude neither the rap music evidence nor the record of online purchases was erroneously admitted in evidence,” the SJC decision said. “We further conclude that the trial judge’s nondeadly force instructions were correct, and that any error in the judge’s omission of an instruction on sudden combat or reasonable provocation was not prejudicial. While we agree that the prosecutor’s remarks during closing argument were erroneous, the defendant was not prejudiced.”
The SJC said that the rap lyrics were not introduced to impugn Colina’s character. Instead, the prosecution “sought to show that the defendant was fascinated with murder, strangulation, decapitation and dismemberment, and that he acted on these interests when he killed the victim. Therefore, this evidence went to the defendant’s state of mind and intent,” the decision said.
Although the lyrics “had the potential to prejudice the defendant because they contained violent imagery and offensive, racially charged language,” the decision said, “the trial judge was within her discretion in concluding that this risk did not outweigh the probative value of the evidence.”
As for the gap between when Colina said he wrote the rap lyrics and the murder, the decision said a CD containing one of the rap songs “was discovered in the defendant’s bedroom soon after” Camilien’s killing.
“Thus, the defendant’s testimony about when he wrote the lyrics did not preclude the trial judge from determining, in her discretion, that a sufficient temporal nexus existed between that rap song and the crimes charged,” the decision said.
“Rather than having an undue tendency to promote an emotional or otherwise improper basis for the jury’s decision, the record of purchases [of items used in the murder], along with the rap lyric evidence, provided a logical basis from which the jury could conclude that the defendant did not merely stumble upon the means to dismember the victim after killing him, but that the defendant potentially made these purchases in anticipation of living out his fantasy,” the decision said.
A stronger
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