Suicide-Texting Trial Raises Questions About Legal System In Digital World
![audio/mpeg Audio icon](/modules/file/icons/audio-x-generic.png)
Michelle Carter told her boyfriend, Conrad Roy, to commit suicide — multiple times — via text message.
“You’re finally going to be happy in heaven. No more pain,” she wrote him once, according to the Washington Post.
When he texted Carter, sitting in his pickup truck seemingly questioning his plan to kill himself, she wrote back, “Get back in.”
He was found dead inside the truck the following day. He had succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning.
Now, Carter is on trial in Massachusetts for involuntary manslaughter.
It’s a trial that raises new questions about our legal system in a digital world. Can someone be convicted in someone’s death, when they were only digitally present on the scene of the crime?
Fore more on this, I spoke with Adam Wandt, deputy chair for Academic Technology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.