TAUNTON, Mass. — The teenage couple shared mundane text messages — about a walk and a trip to get ice cream. But there were darker ones.
“It’s time, babe,” Michelle Carter, then 17, texted to her boyfriend, Conrad Roy, who had just texted that he was “ready.
”“You know that,” she wrote. “When you get back from the beach you’ve gotta do it. You’re ready.”
“Okay, I will,” Mr. Roy, 18, typed back, adding: “No more thinking.”
“Yes, no more thinking,” Ms. Carter wrote. “You need to just do it.”
On Tuesday, Ms. Carter, now 20, is to stand trial here on a charge of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Mr. Roy, who was found dead in his truck in 2014, after that exchange of text messages, more texts and two phone calls.
Mr. Roy was found near a compression pump that had filled the car with carbon monoxide, in a Kmart parking lot in Fairhaven, Mass., and his death was deemed a suicide. But prosecutors say Ms. Carter was to blame.
The case against Ms. Carter is not without precedent, but such cases are rare and raise unusual challenges for prosecutors: To what extent can one person be responsible — and criminally liable — for the suicide of another person?
“The key issue is going to be causation, of who actually caused the death,” said Laurie Levenson, a professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, who said suicide was generally considered the victim’s decision. “Did she,” Ms. Levenson said, “or did the victim himself?”
Armed with reams of text messages, prosecutors have argued in court filings that Ms.
Carter essentially caused Mr. Roy’s suicide, saying she pressured him to kill himself on numerous occasions and even discussed the best methods. They have pointed to phone records and other text messages that suggest the couple were talking on the phone even as Mr. Roy was in the car just before his death. Citing another message she sent to a friend, the prosecutors say she even told him to get back in the car at one point when he climbed out of it and was having second thoughts. If it wasn’t for Ms. Carter, the prosecutors say, Mr. Roy would not have killed himself.But Ms. Carter’s defense lawyers, as well as civil liberties advocates, say there is no law against encouraging someone to commit suicide in Massachusetts (unlike many other states). The lawyers say that prosecutors are stretching the definition of involuntary manslaughter and that it was ultimately Mr. Roy who caused his own death.
“The state has got to show not just that there was encouragement, but that Ms. Carter killed this young man with her words, and that’s a really significant obstacle for the prosecution,” said Matthew Segal of…
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