WORDS CAN KILL
TEXTING SUICIDE GUILTY VERDICT COULD PROMPT GROUNDBREAKING APPEAL
Michelle Carter was miles away when she led Conrad Roy III back into his pickup truck behind a Kmart in Fairhaven.
But when the carbon monoxide began to choke the life out of him, she was “virtually present” at the scene, according to the judge — holding the door shut and callously listening as he took his last painful breath.
The judge’s verdict, at bottom, was that words can kill.
That remarkable ruling will likely be tested before a court of appeals, which will decide whether Carter actually caused Roy to die on July 12, 2014.
“The question is: When she’s not present and she’s not providing the means, what is the relationship between her words and his deed?” asked Nancy Gertner, a former federal court judge. “It’s very unusual that words are enough to create causation in this type of situation.”
Judge Lawrence Moniz found that Carter forced Roy to get back in his truck. The idea that she actually caused her boyfriend’s
death is the key element of involuntary manslaughter, the crime Carter stands convicted of.
Brad Bailey, a criminal defense attorney and former prosecutor, isn’t buying that argument.
“I don’t think there is sufficient proof of causation,” Bailey said yesterday. “In a case of involuntary manslaughter, you have to connect Carter’s conduct to the cause of death — and I think there’s too big a gap.”
Moniz said Carter’s initial text messages pressuring Roy to kill himself were not enough to find her guilty. Roy was alone when he parked in the Fairhaven parking lot and it was his decision to breathe in the carbon monoxide fumes.
Had he stayed in the pickup truck, the judge said, he would have caused his own death. But then he had second thoughts and got out of his vehicle. “He breaks that chain of self-causation by exiting the vehicle,” Moniz said. “He takes himself out of that toxic environment that it has become.”
That’s when Carter got Roy on the phone and told him to get back in. She brushed off “his fears” and “concerns,” according to Moniz, and when the Mattapoisett teen shut the door of his truck and ended his life, Carter was to blame.
“This court has found that Carter’s actions and failure to act where it was her self-created duty to Roy, since she put him in that toxic environment, constituted reckless conduct,” Moniz said. “The court finds that the conduct caused the death of Mr. Roy.”
A state appeals court — and perhaps one day a federal panel — will look at this reasoning when determining whether to uphold Carter’s conviction.
They will be forced to decide whether you can cause someone to take their own life without actually being present.