The Massachusetts girl who sent texts to her boyfriend encouraging him to kill himself will stand trial for involuntary manslaughter.
The highest court in Massachusetts unanimously ruled Friday that a grand jury had probable cause to indict Michelle Carter in the 2014 death of Conrad Roy III, the Associated Press reports. Carter, then 17, had sent Roy, 18, multiple text messages encouraging him to commit suicide, including telling him to “get back in” his truck in the final moments as it filled with exhaust fumes.
“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.
Carter’s lawyer argued that her messages were an expression of free speech protected under the First Amendment.
- How to Help Victims of the Texas School Shooting
- TIME's 100 Most Influential People of 2022
- What the Buffalo Tragedy Has to Do With the Effort to Overturn Roe
- Column: The U.S. Failed Miserably on COVID-19. Canada Shows It Didn't Have to Be That Way
- N.Y. Will Soon Require Businesses to Post Salaries in Job Listings. Here's What Happened When Colorado Did It
- The 46 Most Anticipated Movies of Summer 2022
- ‘We Are in a Moment of Reckoning.’ Amanda Nguyen on Taking the Fight for Sexual Violence Survivors to the U.N.