Michelle Carter and her attorney Joseph Cataldo stand to hear Judge Lawrence Moniz announce his verdict on Friday, June 16, 2017. (Associated Press)

By Dan Glaun | MassLive

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."

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Defense attorneys Cory Madera, left, and Joe Cataldo, right, and defendant Michelle Carter view the scene at a former KMart store in Fairhaven where the body of Conrad Roy III was found in a pickup truck. (Mark Stockwell/The Sun Chronicle)

Carter appeals

Carter was sentenced to 15 months in jail but immediately appealed her conviction, and has remained free pending the appeal.

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court agreed to hear the case and in July her attorneys filed a brief laying out their arguments against her conviction.

Carter's legal team argued that the verdict violated Carter's constitutional right to free speech, that her account of her phone calls with Roy may have been false, that it was improper to charge her with manslaughter and that Roy was ultimately responsible for his own suicide.

The SJC has already addressed several of these issued following Carter's first unsuccessful appeal of her indictment, back in 2016. But her attorneys argued that the court had ruled based only on slanted information give to a grand jury, and that fresh evidence from the trial could lead them to a different conclusion.

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Lynn Roy, mother of Conrad Roy, leaving the court house after Michelle Carter was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)

Free speech

Carter's appeal argued that her conviction was not just wrong on the facts -- it violated the U.S. Constitution.

"Carter's words encouraging Roy's suicide, however distasteful to this Court, were protected speech," her appeal brief argues.

To support their claim, her attorneys cited a Minnesota case in which a man who posed as a depressed woman in online mental health forums and encouraged people to kill themselves was convicted.

The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that the state's ban on "encouraging" suicide was an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, while allowing the state to maintain its ban on "assisting" suicide.

In their response, prosecutors say that Carter's case is entirely different. Their reply draws a distinction between speech that merely encourages or suggest suicide and that which substantively assists a person in killing themselves.

And prosecutors note that Carter was not convicted for the text messages that encouraged suicide. Rather, Moniz ruled that the phone calls the night of Roy's death justified the manslaughter conviction.

"Ordering a depressed teenage to resume a suicide attempt is not constitutionally protected speech," prosecutors wrote in their brief.

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Prosecutors Katie Rayburn, left, and Maryclare Flynn. (Glenn C.Silva/Fairhaven Neighborhood News, Pool)

The phone calls

While phone records proved that Carter and Roy spoke for 90 minutes across two phone calls before his death, there are no recordings of those calls.

For that reason, a September 2014 text from Carter to one of her friends describing proved decisive.

"Sam, [Roy's] death is my fault like honestly I could have stopped him I was on the phone with him and he got out of the [truck] because it was working and he got scared and I f------ told him to get back in," Carter wrote. "I knew he would do it all over again the next day and I couldn't have him live the way he was living anymore."

Prosecutors treated that text as tantamount to a confession, and Moniz agreed, saying in his ruling that it showed Carter had directly acted to cause Roy's death.

But in Carter's appeal, her attorneys argued that Carter may have lied about or exaggerated the phone call in a "single line in a rambling text," noting that prosecutors had described her as dishonest at trial.

In response, prosecutors argue that Moniz was right to credit the text as truthful.

"Carter was indisputably not a reliable reporter of her own life. But there are a number of reasons to believe that when she texts [her friend], 'I was on the phone with him and he got out of the car because it was working and he got scared and I fucking told him to get back in,' she told the truth."

Prosecutors note that in addition to the September text, Carter texted her friend just minutes after her call with Roy, saying she had "heard a loud noise like a motor" and believed he had just killed himself.

They also argue that Roy had repeatedly tried to kill himself before, but had always backed off or sought help. The difference this time, prosecutors said, was Carter's influence.

"His success on this occasion was not due to his finally acquiring a level of determination and decisiveness that he had never before shown with regard to suicide," prosecutors wrote. "It is reasonable to infer that this instead came from her."

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A screenshot from a video recorded by Conrad Roy.

Can words be manslaughter?

Carter's attorneys also said that prosecutors used the vagueness of Massachusetts' involuntary manslaughter law to overcharge her, violating her constitutional rights.

While 40 other states have laws against assisted suicide, Massachusetts does not.

"Who is to say whether a particular case is an acceptable assisted suicide or a blameworthy killing?" the appeal asks. "Can a person assist her elderly friend to end the pain of terminal ALS but not encourage her young friend to end the despair of chronic depression?

Prosecutors rejected that argument in their brief, saying that manslaughter in the state has always been "common law" developed through court interpretation with no need for a specific statute.

And courts have long found that manslaughter can include some forms of verbal conduct, prosecutors wrote -- including during Carter's original appeal in 2016,

"We need not -- and indeed cannot -- define where on the spectrum between speech and physical force acts involuntary manslaughter must fall. Instead, the inquiry must be made on a case-by-case basis," the SJC ruled.

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A small memorial left in the spot where a truck containing the body of Conrad Roy III was found in a former KMart parking lot in Fairhaven in July 2014. (Mark Stockwell/The Sun Chronicle)

Carter's age

Carter was 17 when Roy died, and was charged as a youthful offender -- a category under Massachusetts law that allows more severe sentencing than juvenile charges.

Carter's attorneys brought up her age multiple times in her appeal, arguing she should have been tried as a juvenile and that Moniz was wrong to bar an expert witness on adolescent psychology from testifying at trial.

"It was reasonable, if regrettable, for a juvenile in Carter's position to doubt Roy's threats of suicide, given his history of 'crying wolf,' or to hope Roy's suicide attempt might precipitate a crisis that would force the Roys to get their son professional help," the appeal says. "It was also reasonable, from a teen's perspective, for Carter to heed Roy's demand not to alert anyone to his plans, or else risk his hatred."

Prosecutors replied that Carter was properly charged as a youthful offender, and that Moniz was within his rights to disallow the expert witness.

Because Carter waived her right to a jury trial, Moniz was the fact-finder in the case, meaning that hearing testimony he had already decided was irrelevant would not have affected the outcome, prosecutors argued. They also said he had considered her youth in his verdict.