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| Michelle Carter |
Bristol County Prosecutors have filed their response to the appeal of Michelle Carter, arguing that the Plainville woman was rightfully convicted of involuntary manslaughter for pressuring her boyfriend Conrad Roy III into killing himself.
Roy died in 2014 after he turned on a gas-powered water pump in his truck and allowed the cabin to fill with carbon monoxide, following a lengthy battle with depression.
But police found text messages on Carter's phone that led them to believe it was no simple suicide.
In thousands of communications, Carter and Roy shared intimate details of their struggles with mental health problems. And in the weeks before Roy's death, Carter began urging him to follow through on plans to kill himself.
"I thought you wanted to do this. The time is right and you're ready, you just need to do it! You can't keep living this way," she wrote in one text.
Phone records showed that Carter and Roy spoke on the phone for about 90 minutes the evening he died. In a later text to a friend she said he had gotten out of the car but that she told him to get back in, and that she had heard him die over the phone.
Judge Lawrence Moniz found Carter guilty in June of last year, ruling that her verbal instruction for Roy to get back in the truck constituted the "wanton and reckless conduct" needed to prove a manslaughter charge." ...