RISKY PLAY
GELZINIS: Wouldn’t a jury be more receptive to her tears?
Michelle Carter had tears in her eyes as she took the stand and laid her fate in the hands of the judge, in an eleventh-hour bid to drain the emotion out of her trial and keep the troubled young woman out of jail.
Carter, of Plainville, is accused of persuading 18-year-old Conrad Roy III of Mattapoisett to kill himself via a series of texts, including one stating: “The time is right and you’re ready, you just need to do it!” He was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in his pickup truck in Fairhaven in 2014.
The stage was set yesterday in Taunton for jury selection, but before any pleasantries, Carter’s attorneys asked for a sidebar. Bristol prosecutor Katie Rayburn raised her eyebrows and angrily shook her head as Joseph Cataldo, Carter’s lead defense attorney, told Judge Lawrence Moniz that he wanted a bench trial.
“She has made a knowing and voluntary waiver of her right to a jury trial,” Moniz said after speaking to a red-eyed Carter on the stand.
Cataldo knows this was a massive, make-or-break moment in the case but says he won’t change how he defends Carter.
“This is a huge day. It’s probably the biggest day in her life,” he said after yesterday’s hearing. “This is a huge decision, but we’re optimistic about our case. We’re going to present the case just as we would if there was a jury.”
Cataldo wouldn’t explain the strategy or when he and Carter decided to forgo a jury trial. But he did admit that the decision was unique: He has never done a bench trial in a homicide case.
“First of all, it’s a suicide, not a homicide,” he said, lugging two massive boxes of files onto a courthouse elevator. “This is the first time we’ve done it in this type of case, but we’re confident.”
The move is risky. Cataldo could have tried to convince jurors that Carter’s texts didn’t cause Roy’s suicide. He could have appealed to the parents on the panel who know all too well that teenagers make stupid mistakes and that manslaughter is a heavy charge for someone who sent some inflammatory texts.
But the strategy also takes a deadly arrow out of the prosecutors’ quiver. In a case involving suicide, bullying and a young man on the brink, having a judge make a decision based on the law instead of emotion could work in Carter’s favor.
“It seems that they have a strong legal defense to the case as opposed to a moral defense,” said David Yannetti, a criminal defense attorney, not involved in the case. “The natural, human reaction is that you want to hold someone accountable. That’s a danger here, but not so much with a bench trial.”
Prosecutors likely had a strategy where they would walk jurors through a sad tale of a young man who was on the right track until he met Carter. They could point at her during opening statements and use the theater of the courtroom to make their case.
But with Moniz, a seasoned judge, they will be forced to fit unique facts into a legal rubric and convince just one man, not 12 jurors, that they met their burden of proof.
“Sometimes emotion can creep into testimony, and a juror may think that they can’t let her get away with this,” said Phil Tracy, a longtime criminal defense attorney, not involved in the case. “A judge can make a nonemotional decision and force prosecutors to prove the elements of the crime.”