It's a groundbreaking and disturbing case. A twenty year old is on trial in Massachusetts for manslaughter for texting her boyfriend pushing him to commit suicide when he was wavering and considering going to sleep instead. Prosecutors saying more than a thousand texts Michelle Carter not only pressured Conrad Roy to kill himself, but also instructed him on exactly how to poison himself with carbon monoxide, which he did in
his pickup truck. In the summer of fourteen, the state's highest court rule that prosecutors could go forward with a trial on involuntary manslaughter charges. Carter's defense lawyers say that Roy had long battled depression and had attempted suicide, and that Carter herself had a history of emotional instability. Our
guest is Rosanna Cavalaro, professor at Suffolk University Law School. Rosanna, when I first heard about the case, I thought it was odd and a stretch, But then I read these very dark texts where she's aggressive, pushing him to commit suicide and bullying him when he wavers um. What does
the state have to prove? The state have to prove that she understood that her conduct could pose a risk of significant harm to him, and I think that part is relatively straightforward the context, as you said, the thing she was urging him to do was to end his life.
Cannot be a greater risk than that. The other thing that they have to prove is that her words caused that, And I think that's really where the complexity is, because we like to understand that each individual controls their own decisions are free will is what makes us different from every other animal. Uh. And it's unusual to be able to say that one person causes another to do something as drastic as taking their life. But I think that
the Commonwealth has made inroads on that. That is, they've demonstrated that the aid that she spoken at the circumstances of him being in and out of the car as you described, UH, suggests that a judge could find that her words made the difference, that her words really did override his own decision making. You mentioned a judge. How important is the decision the defense made to waive a
jury trial and have a judge decide the case. Well, I think that the defense expects that if they try it to a judge, there's going to be a little bit less of the kind of raw sympathy that we would get with a cross section of jurors. That sympathy is, you know, nothing wrong with it. It's not inappropriate, but it's sometimes invites jurors to get to a result that they want without absolutely towing the line on the law.
And I think trying to adjudge is a way of saying, we really want a very careful consideration of whether this could ever be a manslaughter. You know, let's assume that the state it proves everything. There's still a real question about whether one person can cause another to make a decision that's life ending. The defense argued to the state's highest court that this was protected speech and lost. Tell
me what the highest court ruled. Well, I think the idea is that you know, there are limits even in the world of speech. You know, you can't yell fire in a crowded theater, is the famous quote. And I can say fire in a lot of different contexts, but if I say it in a way that poses an imminent threat and imminent risk, then I've lost that freedom to speak. It's not an absolutely unlimited right, because you know, words have effects on others, and in certain contexts, even words,
and the right to use them can be limited. What's the defense case, Well, I think the defense, you know, is proceeding on several fronts, one of which is to suggest that she herself was impaired, and I think some of the most recent evidence was about what her circumstances are, whether the medicines that she was relying on were clouding
her judgments. You know, one of those things that we require in any criminal cases that the person we want to punish is a person who was exercising their own will, their own uh men's ray. That is, they were thinking about and understood the nature of their own behavior and
went ahead with it anyway. So if we have a person who's you know, this is not her, but in general, a person who's too drunk to make a decision or is um mentally ill so that they are not in a rational mind frame, then we're not going to punish them, or we're not going to punish them precisely the same way. So that's one area that I think that they were exploring with the evidence about her own medications and her
own treatment history. And then I think they're also going to argue, as they did at the close of the Commonwealth evidence that even if you take everything the way the Commonwealth wants you to take it, we really should hesitate before saying that one person can, through a phone, through a text, take another person's life, which is, you know, a very rough way of saying what manslaughter is. It's
an inexact way of saying it. What what the Commonwealth really saying is she created a risk to him that was so significant and so unreasonable that it deserves punishment. Will that forty minute phone call where Roy got out of the truck apparently feeling afraid, but in a phone call afterwards, Carter told her French she ordered him to get back in the truck, then listened for twenty minutes as he cried in pain and took his last breath and then died. Will that be important for the judge
in determining causation. Absolutely absolutely, That's the center of it and what we're really looking at. And the Supreme Judicial Court mentioned this again in the abstract, not in connection with this exact evidence, although they had some access to it.
Was the idea that one person can kind of override another person's will, that he could be so vulnerable and so diminished in terms of his ability to make his own judgments, that she could push him verbally, push him to do something that was the thing that ended his life. So the Supreme Judicial Court has recognized that possibility. And I think the evidence is very powerful that you know, if ever there were a case where those pieces came together, this,
this could be it. You know, it's it's the technological or modern day equivalent of somebody down below watching a desperate person up on a roof and yelling, jump, you know, jump do it? Uh? And they did it electronically. She did it through a text. But what it amounts to is pushing him beyond a tipping point where he wasn't able to if the court sees it this way, he wasn't able to decide for himself in that moment, Rosanna.
Had there been in about a minute, have there been other cases similar to this, though not exactly the same, You know they have? In fact, the STC cited a couple of them, and I just was looking at them quickly. Uh. One of them was a terrible case, again and involving a domestic situation, her husband and wife at odds, and she threatened to kill herself and he actually made the gun available to her. She was struggling with the gun. He showed her that if she handled it a certain way,
she could succeed in pulling the trigger on herself. And after he showed her, she did it, and she ended her life with the gun. And the court found that his cajoling her like that he's making the gun available, putting it there on the floor for her to reach, and then showing her how she could move her arms the length in such a way that she could fire it on herself, was enough to make him the cause.
Even though undoubtedly he was not touching the gun when it went off, he could still be viewed as the cause of her suicide. So I think we have the precedent there that cases about maybe twenty five or thirty years old, but nothing in the interim has said that it's not good law. Thank you so much. It's it's a tragic case, but certainly incredibly interesting as a legal matter. That's Rosanna Cavallero, Professor at Suffolk University Law School,