Crime, Deaths, Justice, Suicide

Being A Bitch Is Now A Criminal Offense, Apparently

Teen convicted for texting someone to death.

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Michelle Carter (Photo by Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff)

If “free will” is to mean anything, you cannot “suicide” a person to death. You can murder someone, you can accidentally murder someone, you can pay someone to murder someone for you, you can set up a criminal organization under which murders occur on your behalf, you can even set up conditions so inherently unsafe that you are criminally responsible for anybody who happens to die. But you can’t kill a person who kills themselves. The self-killing breaks the causal chain between your actions, however reprehensible, and the death.

Until today.

Judge Lawrence Moniz in Massachusetts found Michelle Carter guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Conrad Roy. Roy killed himself with carbon monoxide poisoning in his car in a Kmart parking lot. But I guess, according to Moniz, Roy didn’t really kill himself, because Carter sent him a lot of mean texts and phone calls encouraging him to commit suicide.

Carter’s texts to her then-boyfriend were undoubtedly mean. Abusive even. She encouraged him to kill himself, believing, she claims, that he really wanted to do it and that he would be happier in heaven if he did. She also called him on his cell phone, encouraging him to go through with it. Allegedly, at one point Roy got out of his car and Carter told him to get back in.

Roy died. It is a tragedy. At trial it came out that Roy had tried to kill himself once before, but reached out to friends and family and was talked out of it. This time, clearly, he picked the wrong friend.

But Roy also picked out the method for his suicide, after doing research on the internet. He picked out the generator and water pump he eventually used to fill his car with deadly toxins. He picked the time, he picked the place. Michelle Carter picked… words.

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Carter was not disturbing the peace. She was not inciting a riot. She didn’t push him into the car and lock the door. She didn’t turn on the gas. She didn’t threaten to kill him if he didn’t do it himself. She told him that if he wanted to kill himself that he absolutely should. I’ll bet you $50 that Mike Pence tells that to Donald Trump every night before he tucks him in.

If we’re going to live in world where words kill people, and self-inflicted wounds are not self-inflicted if somebody tells you to inflict them, how far back in the causal chain are we willing to go? My mom says I’m not fat, I’m just big-boned, will somebody arrest her if I have a coronary? How far back does it go even in the instant case? Who told Michelle Carter that heaven “existed” and was a nice place? Haul their asses into court. Would Roy have killed himself if he knew that only worms and darkness awaited on the other side?

If you don’t want to blame religion, what about Kmart? Don’t they have cameras in their parking lots? And if not, shouldn’t they? The person in the last best position to save Roy probably wasn’t Michelle Carter, but rather some Kmart employee who noticed a car loitering and did nothing. Find that man. Bring him to court. Let justice be done upon him!

The prosecution of Michelle Carter clearly isn’t about justice. It’s about revenge and deterrence. We want to punish Carter because her texts were so mean, and we want to warn teens not to bully each other online because there will be consequences. Convicting someone for texting a man to death is a perverse miscarriage of justice, but if it stops one teen from body-shaming a fellow teen on Instagram, most parents will be cool with the conviction.

Not me. I’m on the record as not accepting the bullied-into-suicide argument. Michelle Carter seems like an awful person, and I don’t think saying that makes me culpable should she later decide to kill herself. The law is designed to prosecute people who do awful things, not people who say awful things.

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Michelle Carter didn’t save Conrad Roy. That’s not the same as killing him. The law shouldn’t have such a hard time distinguishing between the two.

Teenager Who Urged Friend to Kill Himself Is Guilty of Manslaughter [New York Times]

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