Supreme Court rejects appeal in texting suicide case

[Omaha Steve]

Source: AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday left in place the conviction of a Massachusetts woman who sent her boyfriend text messages urging him to kill himself.

Michelle Carter is serving a 15-month sentence after being convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the 2014 death of her boyfriend, Conrad Roy III. A judge determined that Carter, who was 17, caused the death of the 18-year-old Roy when she ordered him in a phone call to get back in his carbon monoxide-filled truck that he’d parked in a Kmart parking lot.

The phone call wasn’t recorded, but the judge relied on a text Carter sent her friend in which she said she told Roy to get back in. In text messages sent in the days leading up to Roy’s death, Carter also encouraged Roy to follow through with his suicide plan and chastised him when he didn’t, Massachusetts courts found.

The case has garnered national attention and sparked legislative proposals in Massachusetts to criminalize suicide coercion.



FILE - In this Sept. 19, 2019, file photo, Michelle Carter, center, arrives for a parole hearing in Natick, Mass. The state's highest court upheld Carter's 2017 involuntary manslaughter conviction in the suicide death of her despondent boyfriend, to whom she had sent insistent text messages urging him to take his own life. The state Parole Board also denied her request for early release. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)


Read more: https://apnews.com/cc38e0b9f4449773babb929e58706301

[bucolic_frolic]

1. I doubt how much "coercion" went on here

You can encourage someone to break the speed limit, or overcook causing nitrosamines, and you're off Scot free in both instances.

[GemDigger]

2. When someone is suicidal and suffering from depression

you don't tell them to do it.

[bucolic_frolic]

3. She was a 17 year old psychologist?

[mountain grammy]

4. No just a 17 year old evil person

who, in my opinion, belongs in prison because she’s a threat to society.

[bucolic_frolic]

5. "Go jump in the lake!"

should land everyone in jail after this ruling

[moriah]

6. No, only when said to a person you know...

... can't swim and has a cinderblock tied to their legs right then.

(That was judge's ruling -- nothing she said until she told him to get back until the carbon monoxide-filled truck, that she knew was filled with CO, mattered.)

[bucolic_frolic]

7. Not to defend her evil words or intent

but she wasn't there at the scene. So she had to believe a suicidal person, whom I would think is not considered rational. Maybe she only partially believed him. I'm not really clear how you keep the fumes inside a vehicle in a parking lot. Was he known to, or did he say, he funneled it in from the tailpipe? Did she think he was bluffing, or did she think she was calling his bluff. I didn't follow the case, so I don't know the details.

[GemDigger]

8. "so I don't know the details."

Maybe you should do some research on it.

[eggplant]

10. For someone who didn't follow the case, you sure have some strong opinions about it.

[Sucha NastyWoman]

9. That is what makes this very different

To deny that this went ov er the line of what it means to be human, is to deny that depression exists.

[GeorgiaPeanut]

11. This was to be expected

Free speech right is no absolute and there is precedent for that.

Inciting someone to commit a violent act can never be "free speech" and that defense was weak.

[marble falls]

12. All free speech is, is a guarantee of no prior restraint. Once the comment is made it is subject ...

to law.