‘Wanton and reckless’

Words can kill. And words texted or emailed can kill just as surely, especially when the recipient is a vulnerable teen suffering from depression.

Yesterday Michelle Carter was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the death of her high school boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, who took his own life at the age of 18. Carter was 17 at the time.

To read the series of text messages from Carter to Roy when he exited his carbon monoxidefilled truck is to know the power of those words.

“This court finds that instructing Mr. Roy to ‘ get back in’ the truck constitutes wanton and reckless conduct by Ms. Carter,” Judge Lawrence Moniz said, adding that neither did she call police or Roy’s family.

“She did not issue a simple additional instruction: Get out of the truck,” the judge said.

The ruling is surely in keeping with last year’s unanimous opinion by the Supreme Judicial Court that allowed the case to go forward.

“In our view, the coercive quality of that final directive was sufficient in the specific circumstances of this case to support a finding of probable cause,” now retired Justice Robert J. Cordy wrote for the court. “Those circumstances included the defendant’s virtual presence at the time of the suicide, the previous constant pressure the defendant had put on the victim, and his already delicate mental state.”

The high court was also quite clear that the circumstances of this particular case were unique.

“It is important to articulate what this case is not about,” the opinion noted. “It is not about a person seeking to ameliorate the anguish of someone coping with a terminal illness and questioning the value of life. Nor is it about a person offering support, comfort, and even assistance to a mature adult who, confronted with such circumstances, has decided to end his or her life.”

So perhaps the legal director of the Massachusetts ACLU might want to rethink the notion that this somehow “imperils free speech.”

It doesn’t — unless that speech is so coercive and “intended to subvert the willpower” of a vulnerable young man that it is the cause of his death.

That is a crime and for that Carter will now be held responsible.