Teen texted beau suicide suggestions
Defense seeks not-guilty finding
Michelle Carter’s defense team will today ask a judge to declare her not guilty in the 2014 death of her high school boyfriend on the heels of potentially damning evidence intended to paint the young woman as the force that caused his suicide.
“We’re going to make a motion for a required finding of not guilty,” Joseph Cataldo, Carter’s lead defense attorney, said to a media scrum outside Taunton District Court.
Motions for a not guilty finding are standard practice in criminal cases, and judges are typically reluctant to grant them in homicide trials. Judge Lawrence Moniz is overseeing this case without a jury after Carter pushed for a bench trial.
It is the judge’s last case before he retires.
It is unclear how Moniz will rule, but yesterday he instructed Cataldo to have defense witnesses ready to testify in case he denies the motion.
The request will come just a day after prosecutors closed their case with evidence that Carter had barraged Conrad Roy III with texts suggesting ways he could kill himself.
“If you wanna do this take 10 benedryls and then wait 10 mins then take all the Tylenol,” a 17-year-old Carter texted Roy on July 6, 2014, a week before his suicide, according to messages prosecutors showed the court.
Later that same day, she wrote: “Hang yourself, jump off a building, stab yourself (I don’t know) there’s a lot of ways.”
Roy was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in his truck in a Fairhaven parking lot on July 13, 2014. That followed weeks of texts from Carter, now 20 and facing involuntary manslaughter charges.
“You’re not gonna kill yourself,” Carter texted Roy on June 22, 2014, prosecutors claim. “You say all the time you want to but look, you’re still here. All the times you wanted to you didn’t.”
The texts were shown as prosecutors questioned state police Sgt. Michael Bates, the law enforcement official who extracted thousands of messages from phones belonging to Roy and Carter.
On July 3, 2014, Carter texted: “Are you gonna do it tonight?”
“I’m gonna try,” Roy, who was then 18, responded.
“How hard are you gonna try?” Carter asked. “Hard,” Roy responded. During cross-examination by Cataldo, Bates acknowledged that there were thousands of text messages between the couple that didn’t have the same tone as those handpicked by prosecutors.