Murder by proxy.
That’s what this Editorial Board thinks of the case of 17-year-old Michelle Carter.
Carter is currently on trial for involuntary manslaughter in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, for pushing her boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, to commit suicide.
“You can’t keep living this way. You just need to do it,” read part of one of the numerous text messages Carter sent to Roy, pressuring him to take his own life.
Roy had made a previous suicide attempt two years earlier and had been struggling with depression, but his relatives said his mental health had been improving, and he had been looking forward to the future.
In our view, both Carter and Roy are — or were — deeply troubled individuals in need of professional psychiatric help. However, we have no sympathy for Carter’s reckless and inexcusable behavior.
Carter claims she encouraged her boyfriend to kill himself because she loved him and “couldn’t have him live the way he was living anymore.”
Even if her attempts to persuade Roy to commit suicide were the result of some twisted idea of love, they were not an appropriate or truly loving response to someone else’s emotional pain.
Problematically, our legal system is not set up to deal with situations like this. What Carter did essentially amounts to emotional and psychological abuse of an already severely depressed individual intended to cause his death, but this is not covered by any specific crime Carter might be charged with.
This Editorial Board believes Carter should be tried as an adult — as the state intends — but long-term incarceration might not be the best solution.
If possible, we would like to see Carter provided with guidance and the professional help she needs.
We also reject the idea that this is a case of assisted suicide.
Many assisted suicide cases involve terminally ill patients who are not given long to live and want to die on their own terms. A few states — Oregon, Washington, Vermont and, as of Sept. 11, California — have passed this type of “Right to Die” legislation.
A 2008 study by researchers at Oregon Health and Science University, however, found that one in four patients electing assisted suicide in Oregon might suffer from depression and therefore not “capable of making rational, informed decisions about ending their lives.”
Clearly, then, depression and suicidal thoughts are much different from the illnesses suffered by those for whom assisted suicide laws have been passed.
These were not the loving, compassionate actions of an individual who genuinely wanted the best for her boyfriend.
The correct response to a loved one’s talk of suicide is to direct the person to appropriate resources and people who can help.
What Carter did in this case was a legally unrecognized form of murder.
