A Massachusetts judge has found 20-year-old Michelle Carter guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the 2014 suicide of her boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, who Carter repeatedly encouraged to commit suicide via text message. The American Civil Liberties Union has condemned the ruling, arguing it “imperils free speech” and could set a new precedent that chills people’s First Amendment rights when communicating via tech tools like text and social media.
But legal experts say Carter’s crime isn’t altogether new, and that it has little to do with texts. It’s based on a long history of legal precedent laying out when speech can be considered a crime and what role the law believes one individual can play in causing another’s suicide. Given that history, the fact that Carter’s communication with her boyfriend happened to play out over hundreds of text messages is almost irrelevant, and shouldn’t have much bearing on what people can and can’t say via smartphone.
“This story is news because it involves technology, but people have been using words to commit crimes as long as there have been crimes,” says Neil Richards, a professor at Washington University Law School, who specializes in speech and constitutional law. “People commit crimes with words, and now people use tech to communicate words, so now people are using tech to commit crimes with words.”
Joseph Cataldo, an attorney for Carter, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that Carter’s messages are protected speech. “These text messages Michelle Carter sent to Conrad Roy are speech. There’s no action,” Cataldo said. “He took his own life. He took all the actions necessary to cause his own death.”
And yet, according to Danielle Citron, author of the book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, there are 21 crimes that have to do explicitly with speech---things like threats, extortion, aiding and abetting, and conspiracy. None of these types of speech are protected by the First Amendment. “If the First Amendment’s a house, where inside speech is protected, threats can’t walk in the door. Neither can extortion. Neither can solicitation of a crime,” Citron says. In other words, not all speech is covered by the First Amendment's proverbial roof.
The details of Carter’s case, of course, have as much to do with criminal law as they do First Amendment law. On July 12, 2014, Roy affixed a water pump to his truck in a Kmart parking lot in an attempt to poison himself with carbon monoxide. He and Carter had already exchanged hundreds of texts in which she aggressively encouraged him to kill himself and even suggested the means by which he should do it. But those texts alone aren’t what landed Carter a guilty verdict. Instead, the prosecution argued that when Roy began to feel the effects of the carbon monoxide poisoning and stepped out of his car, Carter was the one who instructed him, via phone call, to “get back in.” And that, Judge Lawrence Moniz said in his decision Friday, was the moment Carter assumed responsibility for Roy’s life and engaged in “wanton and reckless behavior,” knowing it could cause Roy “substantial harm.”
“He breaks that chain of self-causation by exiting the vehicle,” Judge Moniz said. “He takes himself out of that toxic environment that it has become.”
The concept of the causal chain in suicide cases is one that courts have grappled with for decades, says David Gray, who teaches criminal law at University of Maryland’s Francis King Carey School of Law. The most famous defendant in such a case was, perhaps, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who was tried for murder for allowing terminally ill patients to use his “suicide machine” to kill themselves. Kevorkian was ultimately acquitted because the judge ruled that, although Kevorkian provided his patients with the means to kill themselves, he didn’t actively participate in the “final overt act that causes death.”
“Kevorkian gave them the tools. He may well have wanted it, and believed it was the best thing for them,” says Gray. “But ultimately, they made the final choice. That act broke the causal chain.”
It wasn't until Kevorkian was actually filmed injecting a patient that he was finally found guilty and sentenced to jail time. At face value, that looks like an argument in Carter’s favor. She was, after all, miles from the scene of Roy's death when it happened. But Gray says that there are exceptions when the court decides that the person who commits suicide is compromised and not acting as “a free-willed agent.”
“That’s where this case seems to lie,” Gray says. “This young man was very troubled, very vulnerable, and the defendant exploited that vulnerability, expanded that vulnerability, and substituted her agency for his agency by constantly encouraging him to commit suicide.”
Carter also texted a friend following the suicide, saying, “I helped ease him into it and told him it was okay, I was talking to him on the phone when he did it ... I could have easily stopped him or called the police but I didn’t.” That, Gray says, establishes “consciousness of guilt.”
“She knew he wasn’t in a position to make free choices for himself,” Gray explains.
But while the case may not set new precedents around digital speech, the fact that it was brought as an involuntary manslaughter case is noteworthy, says Richards. In the past, courts have often tried to apply tech-specific law to such cases. In 2006, for instance, a woman named Lori Drew created a fake Myspace account to communicate with a teenage girl named Megan Meier, who Drew believed was spreading rumors about her daughter online. Drew posed as a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans and used it to encourage Meier to kill herself, which she eventually did. But instead of being charged with involuntary manslaughter, Drew was charged with (and later acquitted of) violating Myspace’s terms of service, in violation of the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
“The knee-jerk reaction has always been: Something bad is happening using technology. We ought to pass a law about that use of technology,” Richards says. But the Carter case suggests that courts are beginning to look past the use of technology and see the crime for what it is.
And that means those digital crimes come with severe real life consequences. Carter, who will be sentenced on August 3, faces up to 20 years in prison.
