Carter’s judge OKs last continuance ‘absent a very catastrophic event’
TAUNTON — Attorneys for Michelle Carter, the woman who as a teen allegedly encouraged her high school boyfriend to commit suicide, won their pitch to have her manslaughter trial delayed three months after a fiery hearing yesterday.
“I am going to grant the continuance to June. There will be no further continuances in this case absent a very catastrophic event,” said Judge Lawrence Moniz, indicating that the trial will now begin on June 5.
The trial was originally slated to start next month, but attorneys for Carter argued that they have an “overwhelming amount” of digital evidence taken from computers that belonged to the family of Conrad Roy III — the teen who killed himself by inhaling carbon monoxide in his truck on July 13, 2014.
Prosecutors say Roy was scared, but Carter told him “get back in” the truck as it filled with the poisonous gas, and he did. Carter’s defense attorneys, meanwhile, say troves of digital evidence show that Roy was hell-bent on committing suicide, with or without Carter’s urging.
As part of their bid to have Carter’s trial pushed back, her defense team said there are millions of pages of digital evidence found on four computers that need to be analyzed. There is also a “selfie video” on one of the computers, in which Roy talks about his state of mind just weeks before he committed suicide. Carter’s attorneys say prosecutors didn’t tell them about some of the digital evidence until recently despite knowing about it for two years.
But Bristol Assistant District Attorney Katie Rayburn shot back, saying: “We told defense counsel about those computers from the get-go.”