"Friend" encourages suicide - what should her punishment be?

It’s creepy, I’ll give you that. She’s clearly got problems, but my thoughts beyond that are summed up here:

“I can’t understand why they brought the charge,” Cataldo said. “They’re trying to claim there is manslaughter, when they freely admit the boy took his own life. You can’t have it both ways.”

Legally, I don’t think they have a leg to stand on. She didn’t actually kill him and she didn’t threaten him or anything like that. He killed himself; she just encouraged it. I just don’t think she’ll be prosecuted for that.

Bitch is crazy, though.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?

I agree they probably don’t have a leg to stand on, unless they maybe try utilizing the anti-bullying laws.

She should have also gone to counseling.
On another note, that’s a whole lot of community work to be doing for someone her age.

I Read about that story. I think it is terrible!! From what I read today she is being charged with manslaughter. Due to her age I don’t think she will face any serious jail time though. I Don’t see how that girl can even look in a mirror knowing what she has done.

If true, Michelle Carter is a sociopath. This info should be spread around to warn potential victims. Let’s hope she does not bring children into this world.
Women are already spreading the names of abusing men. Likewise Michelle Carter’s name should be added to the list.

That is appalling. To think that he had second thoughts and she urged him on repeatedly. She is totally sick.

Creepy yes, but I agree with @livelaughlove21 – there’s no case here. No prosecutor is going to indict.

There are a couple of problems with the idea that she’s culpable.

- he killed himself. With her encouragement, but he did it.

- there’s no evidence that he was mentally ill, under her care, or that she had any undue influence on him other than as a friend.

- Unlike a teacher or a parent, a fellow student is under no obligation (legal) to report suicidal thoughts to anyone. Having knowledge of his thoughts (in the article) does not make her obligated to report them.

So… she’s not going to be found guilty at all.

That said, I cannot imagine how any person would want to be her friend going forward.

A stern reprimand. After all, death is a fact of life that people talk about all the time. Just because one person advocates it doesn’t mean the other person has to follow through with it.

It is 2015 Google and the Internet will keep Michelle Carter from procreating. That will likely be her only punishment – forever.

“Hi I’m Michelle Carter. I’m the one who encouraged my 18 year old friend to commit suicide. Want to date?”

Are you 100% positive that she sent the alleged texts?

Why do we even bother with trials, I wonder? Since “everybody knows” she’s guilty of whatever the hell the police want to say she’s guilty of, why not just stone her in the town square right now?

Well, to play devils advocate, the article does not specify exactly what she did/said, only that she encouraged him. Maybe it’s as simple as she saying she supported him in whatever he wanted to do. Not enough information to be the judge, jury and executioner for me.
While I agree that young people taking their lives is tragic, I also agree with ones right to choose their fate and removing the stigma and taboo of suicide so those contemplating it can have the freedom from secrecy to express their feelings is what’s needed without fear of being scorned, shamed or turned into authorities for the need to discuss such a delicate topic.

Tough call, I agree with @kritiper.

@CWOTUS Exactly! If this girl said ” Hey, I just want you to be happy and if you think dying is what you need to do, I support you”, does not make someone a sociopathic monster.

While a teenagers brain is developing, they boarder on mental illness, and being a sociopath is certainly one temporary condition of that.
Well, her awkward teen years has a body count. She will need therapy, but I don’t think prison is the right place to help her, and the DA doesn’t have much chance here.

Someday telling someone to “go play in traffic” will result in criminal charges if that person gets hit by a car later.

You can be convicted of murder if you participate in a killing without pulling the trigger.

Here is the judge explaining this to the jury in the ongoing Aaron Hernandez trial:

“The Commonwealth does not require proof that the defendant himself performed an act that caused Odin Lloyd’s death to establish that the defendant is guilty of murder,”

Link

Indeed @jaytkay, but there’s no murder here. Nobody took this man’s life. Nobody forced him to “pull the trigger”. He acted of his own volition.

The accused girl’s lawyer has correctly, I think, noted that this will never go to trial. I doubt if she can even be indicted.

In the first place, as I have already noted, they have to prove that she was in possession of her phone, and that she and she alone typed the “incriminating” texts. That’s their first bar.

Then they have to additionally prove her mens rea: her “guilty mind”. That is, that she was sober, not under the influence of drugs or alcohol – or someone standing over her with a baseball bat? – and meant her words to cause his death. (A good lawyer could also make a case here for “reverse psychology”, I think.)

So, first, “she typed the texts”, second, “she typed them knowing their likely intent, and she did intend that result”, but there’s more: Have any of you typed on a cell phone lately? Doesn’t everyone laugh at “stupid autocorrect” from time to time? How can the prosecutor prove – beyond “reasonable doubt” – that she typed and intended exactly what appeared on the victim’s device?

This is more than “prosecutorial over-reach”, this is a prosecutor who’s either very, very dense or very well schooled in the art of PR, and simply looking to make headlines. It’s a toss-up to me which is worse.

there’s no murder here

I didn’t mean to imply there was a murder charge. I was just illustrating indirect criminal liability.

“She told me to do it Miss”
“If she asked you to jump off a cliff, would you?”

Reminds me of Münchausen syndrome by proxy – with the difference that in this case, the victim already had a mental illness this horrible girl then took advantage of. I do agree with her being let out of jail – imprisonment seems pointless to me in cases where the prisoner’s offence was non-violent and the person is not provably an active danger to others – but I think she should have to attend counseling for several years plus be assigned lifetime community service, though not around any ill or especially mentally ill people. I’d say that she should have to apologize or make reparations to the boy’s family in some way, except that that seems like it would probably re-traumatize them.

@wildpotato – counseling for what?

Reparations for what?

Either she is guilty or she is not. But if she’s not going to be charged, then what right does the court have to :

- force her to pay reparations to the parents?
– lifetime community service
– forced to attend counseling

Either she is responsible or she isn’t. AND if she isn’t, than none of the steps you suggest are appropriate.

That’s blind vengeance for the sake of lashing out.

But if she’s not going to be charged, then what write does the court have to :

Criminal conviction for manslaughter requires proof “beyond a reasonable doubt”.

Civil suits require less, a “preponderance of evidence”.

That is why OJ Simpson was acquitted of the crime of murder, but afterwards the victim’s families could sue and win civil damages.

The big difference is that criminal conviction can take your freedom – you can be imprisoned.

A loss in a civil suit just means they can take your money and property.

Counseling for being a fucked-up person. Reparations for doing an incredibly fucked-up thing. She is obviously guilty of being a fucked up person and of doing fucked up things, and of some level of responsibility for the boy’s death. Never said she’s guilty of murder or manslaughter in the judicial sense, or that a court will, or even could, actually take the steps I suggest. As many above have pointed out, that ain’t gonna happen.

But that wasn’t what the OP was asking, as I read the question. She didn’t say anything about wondering what the actual legal result would be, but asked what the punishment should be. I figure it’s a What would you do sort of question. But hey, feel free to re-hash the obvious and fairly uninteresting legal situation.

@jaytkay – true. But the other side has to win. And the evidence just doesn’t seem to be much more than wishful thinking.

@wildpotato – I don’t buy that solution.

Being fucked up (and doing stupid things) doesn’t condemn a person to a life of involuntary servitude. If it did, 50% of the population of the US would be in that category.

@wildpotato “She is obviously guilty of being a fucked up person and of doing fucked up things, and of some level of responsibility for the boy’s death.”

Obviously, since we know little to nothing of the actual case or circumstances. I wish I such surety of mind make absolute judgements with next to no information to go by.

Devils advocate again, who really KNOWS what the dynamic here was. Maybe this kid had been threatening suicide for months, years, and maybe the girl got sick of hearing it, sick of trying to help him. Maybe she was imposing reverse psychology,maybe she was tired of his lamenting and finally, exasperated, said ” Fine then, just do it and stop talking about it.”
She is not necessarily fucked up, she is not an accomplice, and words are not actions.

Nobody is responsible for anothers actions or mental health and that’s the bottom line.

I would imagine that the law enforcement agencies have texts, emails, FB pm’s, some kind of proof of extensive conversations. Charges come from the D.A., and the D.A. wouldn’t issue charges if there were no proof.

@elbanditoroso OK – though I’m not sure why community service equals a life of involuntary servitude in your thinking. I get the feeling you and I are coming at community service from different perspectives. I do not think of it as punitive, at least in motivation. From this article: “The emphasis of community service is not on punishment nor on rehabilitation; rather, it is on accountability. It focuses “not on offenders’ needs but their strengths; not on their lack of insight but their capacity for responsibility; not on their vulnerability to social and psychological factors but their capacity to choose.” These differentiate a rehabilitative response from a restorative/community service response to crime. And punitive elements of community service orders may attend its imposition, within a restorative system, only as by-products of the offender’s commitment of time and effort.” I admit I have never been assigned community service and so do not have firsthand knowledge of the time and effort involved, but my impression is that one gets assigned x amount of hours per month or week or whatever, where x hours are not an onerous or debilitating burden. If @livelaughlove21 is still following, maybe she can shed some light on whether I am under a false impression about this time committment, or about the motivations and the expected-vs-actual outcomes of community service assignments.

At any rate, may I ask what solution you would buy?

@Darth_Algar Fair enough – guess I should have added a disclaimer such as: “I hereby offer this answer based on the facts of this event as they have been reported to us so far.” Better?

@Coloma So, I’m a bit curious about what you’d say about responsibility and certain suicides I know of. One example: one of my favorite philosophers is named Jean Amery. He was tortured by the Nazis during the Holocaust and later killed himself. It is known from his writings that his torture and time in the camp affected him permanently and quite negatively. Do the Nazis (either en masse or specifically the men who hurt and imprisoned him and killed his family) bear any (not total) responsibility for Amery’s suicide?

Remember Tyler Clementi? Do Ravi and Wei bear any responsibility for his suicide?

A final example, one close to my heart: one of my best friends was raped in college. She killed herself two years ago. It is known from her conversations with me and our other friends that her rape contributed to the state of mind that led to her suicide. Does the rapist bear any (again, not total) responsibility for her death?

@wildpotato Hm, why would I know anything about community service sentences?

@livelaughlove21 Oh, I just had a hazy idea that you work in a DA’s office or something. Nevermind.

@wildpotato Nope! I interned with probation/parole for two summers, minored in Criminal Justice, and work for attorneys now, but I don’t know much about community service.

Our probationers sometimes had community service as a term of their probation, but it always seemed pretty slack and, more often than not, they could get off easy on it if they did everything else right (coming to their visits with the PO, clean drug tests, paying fees, etc). If they got a job, we preferred they work rather than stay unemployed and work a few hours at the Salvation Army. Probationers being employed was fairly uncommon.

Those that did complete their community service usually only served a few hours a week. I’d hardly call it burdensome.

Not that I agree this girl should get community service for what she did. Just because it’s not overly burdensome doesn’t mean she should have to do it if her actions weren’t illegal.

@wildpotato No. It all comes down to the resiliency factor. Plenty of concentration camp victims and rape victims and POWs have overcome terrible torture and hardship. Some personality types are more fragile than others and some people also determine what they can and can’t live with and that is different for everybody.

I like the saying “Pain happens, suffering is optional” suicide is an option as well.

The creepiest part about it, to me, is that after telling him to “get back in” to his truck when he was having second thoughts is the fact that she went out of her way to raise money and awareness about suicide prevention after the fact. To me, that seems to border on sociopathic attention-seeking or something. Or she got off on how much control she knew she had over him, which just reminds me of the beginnings of being a serial killer or something.

@Coloma Hm, interesting perspective. I guess I feel like, if a certain portion of the population has a lesser resistance to trauma and lack resiliency such that they kill themselves or have their lives ruined as a result of the trauma (for the sake of the argument, let’s say that we can know with surety that x action directly led to y’s trauma), shouldn’t some awareness that Hey, some people are fragile, be part of the thinking of people who enact trauma on others? Like, is there no expectation that the perpetrators ought to have some level of responsibility to know better than to be unbelievably huge dickwads?

Also, I think that suffering may be optional for many people, but for others a change of mindset is not an option because of their biological makeup. So bear with me; I’ve got one more example from the extreme to run past you to illustrate what I’m getting at, if you’ll humor me once again: Say I know a schizophrenic person and, because I am an asshole or something, decide to play a funny joke by hiding a tape recorder in his room with my voice whispering “Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself” over and over. If the man then kills himself, do I bear any portion at all of the responsibility?

Has anyone here actually read the texts she sent or transcripts of the conversations she had with this guy? I don’t see them in that article. I don’t see how I can judge her behaviour without actually seeing what that behaviour was. Perhaps I’ve missed some info, but where is the detail that allows us to know what she said?

@wildpotato Deliberately baiting a fragile or unwell person certainly is not a kind or ethical thing to do, but short of your extreme example of messing with a delusional schizophrenic, there are few instances when the mere words of another could hold them responsible for anothers actions. The “suffering” part of any circumstance is the stories our minds ( egos) create about the right and wrong and injustice of things we experience.
We can stop our suffering by not personalizing situations. Rape happens, suicide happens, murder happens, it is never “personal”, it just is.

I did a little research and this article has a bit more about the evidence (and confirms what I wrote above, which was that the DA would have had some kind of proof in order to bring forth charges).

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/02/27/plainville-teen-charged-with-manslaughter-friend-suicide/WM5yHKA5IpobG2WXEWHLFM/story.html

“Authorities did not include most of Roy’s text messages in their report.”

Which, to me, sounds like they’re selectively including relevant information to make the girl look as bad as possible.

Not including most of the text messages could also be because probably 95% of them were typical “kid stuff” like what they ate for dinner or their opinion of Taylor Swift’s new song.

Sure.

Here’s an Onion article that illustrates my point rather nicely.