SJC hears Carter’s appeal for freedom

The state’s preeminent justices will decide whether a 22-year-old Plainville woman facing 15 months in prison for involuntary manslaughter compassionately coaxed a teenage pal’s suicide or cold-bloodedly talked Conrad Roy III into killing himself.

“He was committed to taking his own life — he had tried it before unsuccessfully — and he did, unfortunately. At most, she may have helped him along that path. She certainly didn’t kill him,” Michelle Carter’s attorney Daniel Marx said yesterday following his argument before the state Supreme Judicial Court for overturning Carter’s 2017 conviction.

Chief Justice Ralph D. Gants did not indicate how soon the court’s decision will come.

“If this was considered assisted suicide, as it might be in other states, she would be found not guilty,” Marx said, “and she should not be guilty in Massachusetts.”

Carter was 17 when Roy, 18, poisoned himself to death in the parking lot of a Fairhaven Kmart on July 12, 2014, by filling his pickup truck with deadly carbon monoxide fumes while talking with Carter by phone and text messages. When a deeply depressed Roy had second thoughts about dying and wanted out of the truck, prosecutors said Carter ordered him to “get back in.”

Carter did not attend yesterday’s appellate proceeding. Her sentence is stayed pending the SJC’s ruling on her conviction.

More than a dozen family and friends of Roy were in attendance. They declined to speak to reporters afterward.

Bristol Juvenile Court Judge Lawrence Moniz sentenced Carter to serve 15 months of a 21⁄2-year sentence after finding that her reckless failure to take any action that could have saved Roy’s life was the catalyst for him going through with the plan.

“I would characterize her actions as trying to help another troubled teenager with a very difficult mentalhealth situation,” Marx said. “It may in hindsight have been misguided. Maybe it would have been better if she’d made other choices. ... I think she was trying her best to help someone who she cared about very much, and she’s devastated by his death.”

State law addressing assisted suicide is murky at best. It simply states suicide and mercy killing are not condoned, authorized or approved “other than to permit the natural process of dying.”