Michelle Carter Guilty of Manslaughter for Urging Her Friend to Commit Suicide

[wmbondurant]

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/1...onrad-roy.html




Guilty Verdict for Young Woman Who Urged Friend to Kill Himself

JUNE 16, 2017
TAUNTON, Mass. — For a case that had played out in thousands of text messages, what made Michelle Carter’s behavior a crime, a judge concluded, came in a single phone call. Just as her friend Conrad Roy III stepped out of the truck he had filled with lethal fumes, Ms. Carter told him over the phone to get back in the cab and then listened to him die without trying to help him.

That command, and Ms. Carter’s failure to help, said Judge Lawrence Moniz of Bristol County Juvenile Court, made her guilty of involuntary manslaughter in a case that had consumed New England, left two families destroyed and raised questions about the scope of legal responsibility. Ms. Carter, now 20, is to be sentenced Aug. 3 and faces up to 20 years in prison.

The judge’s decision, handed down on Friday, stunned many legal experts with its conclusion that words alone could cause a suicide.

“This is saying that what she did is killing him, that her words literally killed him, that the murder weapon here was her words,” said Matthew Segal, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, which raised concerns about the case to the state’s highest court. “That is a drastic expansion of criminal law in Massachusetts.”


Ms. Carter’s defense team is expected to appeal the verdict. Legal experts said that it seemed to extend manslaughter law into new territory, and that if it stood, it could have far-reaching implications, at least in Massachusetts.

“Will the next case be a Facebook posting in which someone is encouraged to commit a crime?” Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge and Harvard Law professor, asked. “This puts all the things that you say in the mix of criminal responsibility.”

Judge Moniz unspooled his verdict in a packed courtroom, which was silent except for his voice and Ms. Carter’s gasping sobs. By the time he told Ms. Carter to stand up, and pronounced her guilty, the two families seated on either side of the courtroom’s aisle — Ms. Carter’s and Mr. Roy’s — wept, too.

The verdict concluded an emotionally draining weeklong trial in southeastern Massachusetts involving two troubled teenagers who had built a virtual relationship largely on texting from 2012 to 2014. Ms. Carter, then 17, started out encouraging Mr. Roy, 18, to seek treatment for his depression but then abruptly changed, and in the two weeks before he killed himself on July 12, 2014, she encouraged him, repeatedly, to do it.

For all the scrutiny during the trial of their texts, the judge based his guilty verdict on a phone conversation.

Once Mr. Roy drove his truck to a remote spot at a Kmart parking lot, the two ceased texting and instead talked on their cellphones. When Mr. Roy, with fumes gathering in the cab of his truck, apparently had a change of heart and stepped out, the judge said, Ms. Carter told him to get back in, fully knowing “his ambiguities, his fears, his concerns.”


“This court finds,” the judge added, “that instructing Mr. Roy to get back in the truck constituted wanton and reckless conduct.”

But the phone conversation was not recorded, and the only evidence of its content came three months after the suicide in a text from Ms. Carter to a friend.

“Sam his death is my fault, like honestly I could have stopped him,” Ms. Carter wrote. “I was on the phone with him and he got out of the car because it was working and he got scared.”

She said she then instructed him “to get back in.”

The prosecution made this phone call, as described in Ms. Carter’s text, the heart of its case. And the judge accepted it as factual and incriminating.

The defense strongly argued that there was nothing to substantiate what Ms. Carter had said on the phone and insisted that Mr. Conrad, who had tried to kill himself before, was determined to take his own life, regardless of anything Ms. Carter did or said.

Judge Moniz acknowledged that Mr. Roy had taken steps to cause his own death, like researching suicide methods, obtaining a generator and then the water pump with which he ultimately poisoned himself. Indeed, Judge Moniz said that Ms. Carter’s text messages pressuring him to kill himself had not, on their own, caused his death.

Instead, the judge zeroed in on the moment that Mr. Roy climbed out of his truck.

“He breaks that chain of self-causation by exiting the vehicle,” Judge Moniz said. “He takes himself out of that toxic environment that it has become.” That, the judge said, was a clear indication that Mr. Roy — as on his previous suicide attempts — wanted to save himself.


But, the judge said, Ms. Carter had a duty to help Mr. Roy after she had put him in danger by ordering him back into the truck.

“She admits in a subsequent text that she did nothing, she did not call the police or Mr. Roy’s family,” the judge said. “She called no one. And finally, she did not issue a simple additional instruction: ‘Get out of the truck.’”

The verdict stunned many legal specialists because suicide is generally considered, legally, to result from a person’s free will.

Daniel Medwed, a law professor at Northeastern University, said the decision surprised him because the manslaughter charge seemed “a stretch” to begin with. Because Ms. Carter was not at the scene, and Mr. Roy ultimately acted alone, he said, it was difficult to prove she “caused” the death.

Ms. Gertner of Harvard said that likely grounds for appeal would be that the verdict had “extended the law of involuntary manslaughter to an arena into which it hasn’t been extended before — the notion of liability with respect to a suicide for someone who failed to act, who wasn’t present, who didn’t provide the instrumentalities for the suicide and the concept of a failure to intervene are all unique and that’s what would be litigated.”

At its core, the case was about two troubled teenagers and the fatal path their online relationship took.

[pyromancer555]

The defence argument of " she was fucked up on anti depressants" is one of the dumbest fucking things I've ever heard. You're a defence lawyer try harder.



They looked really confused in the video too. What did they really expect was going to happen?

[SLAPAPPY]

If I tell you to go fuck yourself and you do will I get charged for rape too! Go stick it up your ass and you do is a buggery charge! Lord thundering Jesus boy this can of worms is going to hook a lot of fish!

[pyromancer555]

Originally Posted by SLAPAPPY

If I tell you to go fuck yourself and you do will I get charged for rape too! Go stick it up your ass and you do is a buggery charge! Lord thundering Jesus boy this can of worms is going to hook a lot of fish!

The damming evidence like the article said was that she said she knew she fucked up and could've helped him but didnt.

[wmbondurant]

She had malicious intent with no regard for life .

::::
He didn't and still went to jail

[Sibella]

I'm glad this ugly troll was found guilty. They are appealing it of course but she was wrong..she basically got in his head for months telling him all the reasons he should die. Then listened to him die on the phone!! He got out of the truck and was scared and she convinced him to get back in. Fuck her, I hope she rots.

[SLAPAPPY]

In this world of PC liberals trying to take away your right of free speech it won't be long now where what you say will be as liable as what you do!

[pyromancer555]

That's not free speach in this case. Look up what free speach is in the us. Anything that is used to invoke death to start destruction isn't covered by the 1st amendment. Not saying I agree. But that's the law.

[CrunchyCripple]

What she did was a type of "grooming".

Continuously egging on a person with known mental issues to kill themselves, is no different than teaching a child how to be your sexual partner. Using sweet comforting words instead of physical force, does not make it better.

Perverting a vulnerable mind into physical and emotional harm is illegal, at least in some cases.

[SuceMaTub]

Originally Posted by SLAPAPPY

If I tell you to go fuck yourself and you do will I get charged for rape too! Go stick it up your ass and you do is a buggery charge! Lord thundering Jesus boy this can of worms is going to hook a lot of fish!

More than you know.