20-year-old Michelle Carter has been found guilty of manslaughter, for sending her late vulnerable boyfriend text messages encouraging him to kill himself.
A Massachusetts judge sentenced Michelle Carter to two-and-a-half years in prison on Thursday for urging her 18-year-old boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, to commit suicide via phone conversations and text messages in 2014.
Roy poisoned himself by inhaling carbon monoxide in his pickup truck in 2014, following hundreds of text messages about suicide shared between the two, and a phone call in which Carter told him to “Get back in the fuckin car.”
“Hang yourself, jump off a building, stab yourself,” Carter wrote in just one of her texts to Roy.
Juvenile Court Judge, Lawrence Moniz during the sentencing said, ‘this court must and has balanced between rehabilitation, the promise that rehabilitation would work and a punishment for the actions that have occurred’.
Moniz sentenced Carter to a two-and-a-half-year term with 15 months in jail and the balance suspended. plus a period of supervised probation till 2022, which started on Thursday.
Tried as a youthful offender, Carter faced up to 20 years in prison.
However, because she was 17 at the time of the crime and allowed to remain free on bail following her conviction, experts believed she’d receive a light sentencing with little to no jail time — the focus being on rehabilitation over punishment.
