A woman who encouraged her suicidal boyfriend to kill himself in dozens of text messages and told him to “get back in” a truck filled with toxic gas was sentenced Thursday to 15 months in jail for involuntary manslaughter.
Michelle Carter, now 20, was convicted in June by a judge who said her final instruction to Conrad Roy III caused his death.
Carter was 17 when the 18-year-old Roy was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in July 2014.
Juvenile Court Judge Lawrence Moniz gave Carter a two-and-a-half-year jail sentence but said she had to serve only 15 months of that. He also sentenced her to five years of probation. He granted a defense motion that would keep Carter out of jail until her appeals in Massachusetts courts are exhausted.
The judge called the case, which has garnered international attention, “a tragedy for two families”.
Carter’s lawyer, Joseph Cataldo, had asked the judge to spare his client any jail time and instead give her five years of probation and require her to receive mental health counseling. He said Carter was struggling with mental health issues of her own – bulimia, anorexia and depression – during the time she urged Roy to kill himself.
In dozens of text messages, Carter had urged Roy to follow through on his talk of taking his own life. “The time is right and you are ready... just do it babe,” Carter wrote in a text the day he killed himself.
The sensational trial was closely watched on social media, in part because of the insistent tone of Carter's text messages.
“You can't think about it. You just have to do it. You said you were gonna do it. Like I don't get why you aren’t,” Carter wrote in one text.
Cataldo argued that Roy was determined to kill himself and nothing Carter did could change that.
He said Carter initially tried to talk Roy out of it and urged him to get professional help, but eventually went along with his plan.
Cataldo also argued that Carter's words amounted to free speech protected by the First Amendment.
(The article has been edited for length.)
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