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.â€
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.â€
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.â€
“This court finds,†the judge added, “that instructing Mr. Roy to get back in the truck constituted wanton and reckless conduct.â€
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.â€
She said she then instructed him “to get back in.â€
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.
.....She is nut case on every level and the thought of someone like her roaming the streets was scary. I mean who in their right mind convinces someone to kill themselves, only a person who is insane.
