After a bit less than a year in prison, a Massachusetts woman who encouraged her boyfriend to kill himself via text message has been released.
Carter, 23, was convicted in 2017 for the 2014 death of her boyfriend by suicide. Conrad Roy III filled his pickup truck full of poisonous gas after a text exchange with Carter where she encouraged him to take his own life.
In 2014, a string of text messages indicated that Carter had repeatedly pushed Roy to kill himself. At the time, Carter was 17 and Roy was 18.
Text records reveal that the day that Roy took his own life, he expressed reluctance to go through with it. He was scared, he told Carter. He didn’t want to get into the truck.
Carter told Roy to “get back in.”
The jury found Carter guilty of involuntary manslaughter. She spent almost a year in prison.
Carter’s lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court to overturn Carter’s guilty verdict. Ten days before her release, the Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal.
Carter spent about 11 months in prison. The judge sentenced her to 15 months, but she earned enough “good time” for an early release.
Roy’s family expressed relief that Carter was unable to seek an appeal with the Supreme Court. They said, “news of the Supreme Court denying to hear her case far out shadowed the news of her early release. Her time in jail, no matter how long or short, will not change the outcome of a guilty verdict which is thankfully being upheld.”
The statement from the family continued, “She was the only person who could have saved him. She didn’t, in fact she was on the line with him as he was dying, moaning in pain, gasping for last breaths. Who could do that?”
Finally, they added, “She did, and we’ll never really know why.”
The case has had a lasting impact in the court of law.
A proposed bill in Massachusetts, called “Conrad’s Law,” would make it a crime to encourage someone to commit suicide. It would be punishable by up to five years in prison.
Carter’s case was the subject of an HBO Documentary, called “I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth vs. Michelle Carter.”
