If
friendship is about helping your friend in times of need, then what would you
call a relationship wherein a friend encourages another to kill himself?
As strange
as it may seem to be, this is a real life incident wherein a suicide victim’s
friend faces charges of involuntary manslaughter.
Michelle
Carter, 18, has been accused of urging Conrad Roy III, 18, to commit suicide
inside his truck.
Discussing
a one-of-its-kind case, Karen
DeSoto, an on-air legal analyst and attorney, joined Alex Witt on MSNBC and
provided some insights on the incident that took place in July 2014.
Allegedly,
depicting a strange behaviour Michelle Carter exchanged over 1,000 text
messages with Roy, advising him to kill himself inside his truck, which
eventually resulted in his death due to carbon monoxide poisoning.
Karen
described the
case as ‘unusual’ and said that it is difficult to separate the emotional
aspect from the ethical and moral issues in such types of cases. According to
Karen, involuntary manslaughter is defined as ‘reckless disregard for human
life’.
So, the
grey area in the case is whether Carter knew that her words are going to cause her
friend’s death, as use of words to kill someone is certainly unusual. Besides
this, can this act of Carter be termed as involuntary manslaughter? This is something
extremely important to be figured out!
Karen
stresses on the fact that Carter had a lawful obligation to talk with Roy and
calm him down or contact his parents, instead of urging him to get back in the
truck.
