What Happened
Michelle Carter, the Massachusetts teenage girl who did not “exercise her duty” to intervene in her boyfriend’s digital suicide but instead encouraged him to finish the job in a phone call and through a series of texts, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter by Judge Lawrence Monitz, an act perhaps of legal supererogation and a conviction that carries a possible twenty year sentence.
Massachusetts has once again shown that it is still a place of legal extremism, and is one in which its courts frequently do not respect the Constitution or the legal presumptions accorded ordinary citizens in legal controversy.
The “most liberal state in the union” is a one of extremely top heavy bureaucratic and criminal justice structures with kangaroo courts and activist judges who sometimes rule by fiat. This is a monolithic system that ordinary income citizens and the poor cannot possibly overcome, the way the rich can and do, and often end up, wrongly, remanded into its prisons.
She Tried to Help
Conrad Roy III killed himself in his truck in 2014 in a Kmart parking lot by recirculating the carbon monoxide fumes from the exhaust with a garden hose into the cabin of the truck, many physical miles away from Carter but connected by telephone.
At one point, in a phone conversation, Carter told Roy to “get back in” when the young man exited the truck after having been overcome with fear, constituting, in the opinion of the judge, the lynchpin of “wanton and reckless” criminal behavior that led to Roy’s death and the guilty verdict.
But could this have been the admonition of an impressionable young girl who was convinced by Roy that his pain should end, rather than the meticulous instruction of a cold-blooded murderer?
Two Depressed Teens
The attorney for Carter, Joseph Cataldo, argued that Conrad Roy III had struggled with depression and suicidal ideation for years. Roy’s own mother candidly testified that he attempted to take his own life in 2012 by trying to overdose on Tylenol. His parent’s divorce was a major factor in bringing about the depression, but, argued Cataldo, the physical and verbal abuse Roy suffered at the hands of family members was what pushed him to begin researching for ways to commit suicide long before Michelle Carter was ever involved.
In other words, Cataldo established that the death had long since been planned out, was Roy’s idea, and was acted upon later by Roy himself, with Michelle Carter’s exhortations by text and phone only casually but not criminally influencing Roy and not rising to the level of reckless and wanton criminal behavior. Therefore, according to Cataldo, the death was a suicide and not a homicide.
Mr. Cataldo said that Conrad Roy III was intent on taking his own life, no matter what Michelle Carter said. And many in the mental health community agree that one cannot be persuaded to kill themselves when a person does not wish to end their life, nor can a person intent on such an act be persuaded out of it.
At some earlier point, when Roy was talking about and researching ways to end his life, Michelle Carter actually advised him to get help and tried to talk him out of it, yet the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ignored that information out of hand and allowed the case to go to trial. But the young man persuaded Carter, who herself suffered from psychological problems arising out of eating disorders and was on antidepressant medications at the time of the call, that this was his destiny.
Mental Health is Not Criminal
This is where so many courts get it wrong in this country: treating mental health issues as matters for the criminal courts to adjudicate. But a Massachusetts court has once again jumped a considerable, even alarming, legal mile in expanding the definition of criminal culpability to include mere words. This is especially alarming since there are no laws against assisting suicide on the books in that state.
Carter, on several occasions, was herself a patient at the Belmont, Massachusetts, psychiatric facility, the McLean’s Hospital, and here too, the Taunton, Ma, court paid no attention to this mitigating bit of evidence. For that matter, Conrad Roy’s own struggles with mental health were all but ignored. The court essentially treated the defendant and the decedent as though they were two mentally able adults engaging in criminal and reckless behavior that resulted in a homicide.
Judicial Over-reach
And because courts must rule within the framework of prevailing law, Michelle Carter committed no crime in Massachusetts in 2014—even if she did in fact assist in the suicide.
Legal Community Shocked at Verdict
The American Civil Liberties Union severely rebuked the decision as an assault on free speech that may act to hamper First Amendment rights by criminalizing casual discussions over digital devices and on social media sites.
Other legal observers were openly shocked by the Massachusetts verdict because of the precedent that such a ruling could set in Massachusetts. While most cases like Carter’s typically turn on a defendant’s providing “the physical means,” such as a gun, knife or some other weapon, to help another take their own life, the case of Michelle Carter is a truly frightening instance of judicial overreach because much more casual language, mere words on Facebook, over texts, or even in emails, can now be construed as “wanton and reckless,” potentially landing legions more Americans, children and adults alike, in Massachusetts prisons.
This verdict legally amounts to the court formally saying that Carter killed Roy with her words alone from 30 miles away, words that now can be defined in strict legal terms as murder weapons in a proceeding.
Harvard Law Professor Nancy Gertner, and former Federal judge, hypothesized, “Will the next case be a Facebook posting in which someone is encouraged to commit a crime?” Professor Gertner went on to say, “This puts all the things you say in the mix of criminal responsibility,” a very radical, extreme, and profoundly restrictive idea that puts every American in Massachusetts in danger of incarceration while communicating through a digital device.
The Millennial Defense
Additionally, Michelle Carter was a minor at the time, and courts have long recognized that minor children, as well as those close to the age of 18, simply do not have the same cognitive and mental faculties as adults. This is one of the main reasons there are whole courts dedicated to adjudicating the crimes of children and why punishment is often much less severe.
Adolescents are simply not as able as adults to understand and adequately evaluate the risk and end-result of their actions. In other words, the most obvious argument, the so-called “millennial argument,” argues New England Law Boston Professor David Siegel, would be persuasive to a judge in this case.
Courts tend to be open to this argument, especially because the two were actually teens at the time of the suicide and were not physically together but were 30 miles apart while using electronic devices to communicate.
In the end, the march toward greater restrictiveness of ordinary Americans’ behavior and a gross lowering of burdens of proof by Massachusetts courts are frightening trends that now include one of the most radical and unprecedented rulings in some time in Massachusetts: That one’s words can be lethal and construed as deadly weapons.
New Ground
This verdict does not follow case law—excepting a poor attempt at justification of the verdict by referencing the case of the Worcester, Ma, cold storage fire in which six firefighters died; it does not follow the Constitution nor any other known standards in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. This was a fiat ruling that itself was reckless, and it should not be allowed to stand. No court in the United States should be allowed to disregard mitigating or otherwise exculpatory evidence under any circumstances as is currently done.