Michelle Carter sentenced for texts urging friend to commit suicide

Michelle Carter, the Massachusetts woman convicted in June of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging a close friend, through text messages and phone calls, to commit suicide, was sentenced on Thursday to 15 months in county jail.

Carter was 17 in 2014 when the friend, Conrad Roy III, who was 18, poisoned himself with carbon monoxide in his truck. She had faced up to 20 years in prison. Her sentence was stayed pending expected appeals. "This court must and has considered a balancing between rehabilitation, the promise that that rehabilitation would work and a punishment for the actions that have occurred," Judge Lawrence Moniz of Bristol County Juvenile Court said, announcing the sentence in a crowded courtroom.

In statements read in court before the sentencing, Roy's family asked the judge to impose the maximum sentence. "I cannot begin to describe the despair I feel over the loss of my son," his father, Conrad Roy Jr, told the court. He said that Carter had "exploited my son's weaknesses and used him as a pawn in her own well-being." He said she behaved "viciously," and he asked the court, "In what kind of world is this behavior okay and acceptable?"

Prosecutors asked for a sentence of from seven to 12 years. Speaking for Carter, her lawyer, Joseph P Cataldo, asked the court for leniency and five years of supervised probation. He said Carter regretted what had happened and was in the grip of her own mental illness at the time when these two young, troubled lives came together. "The goal is not punitive but rehabilitative," he said.

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Thorny questions

The sensational case raised thorny questions about whether Carter could be considered responsible for Roy’s suicide – especially when she was far from the scene and had not provided him with a weapon. But Carter had sent Roy scores of texts encouraging him to kill himself. And on the night in question, after he climbed out of his truck as it filled with fumes, she talked to him by phone and, according to prosecutors and the judge, told him to get back in.

He did, and was found dead the next morning. Carter’s failure to help him in that crucial moment – either by calling the police or by urging him to stay out of the truck ? was what led Moniz to find Carter guilty of involuntary manslaughter during the nonjury trial.

“Where one’s action creates a life-threatening risk to another, there is a duty to take reasonable steps to alleviate the risk,” the judge said in issuing his verdict. The outcome of the emotionally exhausting weeklong trial stunned many legal experts, who said it broke legal ground by suggesting that words alone – in essence, speech itself ? could be deemed to cause a suicide. Speech in this case was ruled to be as powerful as a loaded gun, a verdict with potentially broad implications.

The judge’s conclusion was particularly unexpected, several lawyers said, because Massachusetts is one of a few states that do not explicitly outlaw encouraging or persuading someone to commit suicide. The verdict was surprising for another reason: No firm evidence was presented in court to prove what Carter had actually said to Roy in those final moments. There was no recording or transcript of the phone call. The belief that she had ordered him to get back into his truck was based on a text that Carter sent to another friend three months after the death.

“Sam his death is my fault, like honestly I could have stopped him,” Carter wrote in the text message. “I was on the phone with him and he got out of the car because it was working and he got scared and I [expletive] told him to get back in.”

This assertion formed the heart of the prosecution’s case against Carter, and the judge based his verdict on it. “She admits in a subsequent text that she did nothing ? she did not call the police or Mr. Roy’s family,” Moniz said in issuing the verdict. “Finally, she did not issue a simple additional instruction: ‘Get out of the truck.’”

After the verdict, Martin W Healy, the chief legal counsel for the Massachusetts Bar Association, expressed support for the judge's conclusion. Healy said in a statement that Carter had sealed her fate "through the use of her own words."

"The communications illustrated a deeply troubled defendant whose actions rose to the level of wanton and reckless disregard for the life of the victim," Healy said. Many expect Carter to appeal the conviction. If the verdict is allowed to stand, it will "chill important and worthwhile end-of-life discussions," said Matthew Segal, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.

Met on vacation

The case was difficult from the start. Carter and Roy had met on vacation in Florida through their families, but once both were back in Massachusetts, they rarely saw each other. But they developed an intense virtual relationship, texting dozens of times a day; she called him her boyfriend, although he did not seem to regard her in the same way. Both were troubled teens, with deep social anxieties. Roy was depressed and had tried to kill himself before, while Carter, who had an eating disorder and said she had been cutting herself, had been treated in a psychiatric hospital.

At first, Carter tried to dissuade Roy from killing himself, according to many of their text messages, which became public during the trial. But he appeared determined to do so, and eventually she gave up trying to talk him out of it and embraced the idea.

“If this is the only way you think you’re gonna be happy, heaven will welcome you with open arms,” she wrote him. She then helped him plan the details of how to kill himself with carbon monoxide, even advising him at one point, “If you emit 3200 ppm of it for five to ten mins you will die within a half hour.” (– New York Times)