AP: A teenager who sent her boyfriend dozens of text messages encouraging him to take his own life and told him to "get back in" a truck filled with carbon monoxide fumes must stand trial for involuntary manslaughter, the state's highest court ruled Friday.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled Friday that a grand jury had probable cause to indict Michelle Carter, then 17, in the 2014 death of Carter Roy III, 18.
Carter's lawyer had argued that her texts were free speech protected by the First Amendment and didn't cause Roy to kill himself.
But the court, in a strongly worded decision, said the grand jury heard evidence suggesting that Carter engaged in a "systematic campaign of coercion" that targeted Roy's insecurities and that her instruction to "get back in" his truck in the final moments of his life was a "direct, causal link" to his death.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled Friday that a grand jury had probable cause to indict Michelle Carter, then 17, in the 2014 death of Carter Roy III, 18.
Carter's lawyer had argued that her texts were free speech protected by the First Amendment and didn't cause Roy to kill himself.
But the court, in a strongly worded decision, said the grand jury heard evidence suggesting that Carter engaged in a "systematic campaign of coercion" that targeted Roy's insecurities and that her instruction to "get back in" his truck in the final moments of his life was a "direct, causal link" to his death.
"In sum, we conclude that there was probable cause to show that the coercive quality of the defendant's verbal conduct overwhelmed whatever willpower the eighteen year old victim had to cope with his depression, and that but for the defendant's admonishments, pressure, and instructions, the victim would not have gotten back into the truck and poisoned himself to death," Justice Robert Cordy wrote for the court in the unanimous ruling.
The case drew national attention after transcripts of text messages Carter sent to Roy were released publicly, showing her urging him to follow through on his plan to kill himself and chastising him when he expressed doubts.
"I thought you wanted to do this. The time is right and you're ready, you just need to do it!" Carter wrote in one message.
"You can't think about it. You just have to do it. You said you were gonna do it. Like I don't get why you aren't," she wrote in another message.
9 comments:
She'll make some lucky guy one Hell of an ex-wife.
I look into those eyes and she no understanding of the value of life.
Leland, Reading body language for a living, the eyes are key and you nailed it w/ this bitch.
the compulsion to do what she did while leaving the trail of evidence pointing back to her must have been overwhelming. assuming her parents did a half decent job.
Hang her. hang her high.
But massive amounts of leftist douchebags calling for the assassination of Trump and for violence to be met upon his supporters get to roam free.
When I see this girl, I see a world class hometown manipulator.
She looks depressed. She should get into group therapy with other depressed adolescents and, by helping them to resolve their feelings of inadequacy, she could thereby cheer herself up.. Think wholesale, not retail. With the the right group and the right focus, she could be another Rev. Jones.
She must have felt pretty powerful coaxing that young man to die -- the power of life and death.
She seems the sort who would video her first abortion and post it.
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