Several articles appeared today on the most recent development in the case of the Boston teenager, Michelle Carter, who encouraged her boyfriend, Conrad Roy, to kill himself. Carter allegedly sent Roy dozens of text messages encouraging Roy to end his life, and communicated with Roy while he inhaled carbon monoxide fumes from his truck inside his garage. Specifically, Carter is alleged to have told Roy to “get back in” his truck after he got out briefly. Carter has been charged with manslaughter. Today, argument was made before the Supreme Judicial Court on appeal from the lower juvenile court’s refusal to dismiss the manslaughter charge.
I am a criminal defense lawyer in Texas, and don’t know the first thing about criminal law in Massachusetts. In Texas, a person commits manslaughter when the person “recklessly causes the death of an individual.” (19.04). I would suspect that this is near what manslaughter means in most states. The issue in Carter’s case will undoubtedly center on whether her texts and verbal instruction via telephone to “get back in” the truck caused Roy’s death. Reduced to its most basic form, the argument is whether speech can cause a person’s death.
I should stop here and say that what happened to Mr. Roy was a tragedy of the highest order. Anytime a person feels so despondent and abandoned as to take his own life, a tragedy has occurred. When the person is young, the tragedy is that much greater. No one, I believe, would condone the behavior of Ms. Carter or think that what she did was okay. Indeed, to say that her texts and words were evil is no understatement. Her behavior was deplorable and evidences seriously flawed moral character. But whether Ms. Carter’s behavior is a criminal offense is an altogether different matter. We do not punish people for deficits of character.
I am troubled by the notion that words could legally cause the death of someone. I understand the abstract argument that words do “cause” death in some sense. The instruction “fire!” to a firing squad “causes” the death of the condemned man, insofar as “fire” directly precipitated the firing of the guns. But, without question, the word “fire” did not kill the condemned man—the bullet(s) from the firing squad members did. I understand that some would argue that words can “cause” the death of someone, inasmuch as the messenger’s news of Juliet’s “death” in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet “caused” Romeo to take his life. But, again, the words did not “cause” the death—poison did. I understand that metaphorically, the pronouncement by a jury that a defendant is sentenced to death “causes” the defendant’s death—he has been, by their words, “sentenced to death.” But, this is abstraction.
I am unconvinced, however, that words—the act of speaking or writing words itself, or the written or spoken word itself, which is Ms. Carter’s conduct here—“cause” death in the legal sense of causation. And I deeply troubled as to what any court holding that words could legally “cause” someone’s death could mean for the First Amendment.