Michelle Carter‘s 15-month sentence for involuntary manslaughter afterencouraging her teen boyfriend’s 2014 suicidethrough texts and phone calls will end next week when she is set free more than three months early.
Under the terms of the sentence she began serving in February 2019, Carter’s original release date would have been May 5. If the January 23 release date holds, she will have served just 11 months and 12 days.
Michelle Carter.AP/REX/Shutterstock
Carter’s conviction followed her role in the death of 18-year-old Conrad Roy III, who was found dead from carbon monoxide poisoning in his pickup truck on July 13, 2014, in the parking lot of a Kmart in Fairhaven, Massachusetts.
In hundreds of texts and statements that came to light afterward, Carter, who was 17 at the time, was revealed to have pressured Roy to go through with the act.
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The judge who found her guilty cited Carter’s written admission to a friend that, after Roy got out of the truck and shared his last-minute fears with Carter in a phone call before he died, she had told him to “get back in.”
Both teens had struggled with depression, and Roy had made previous attempts at suicide.
Although Carter’s defense acknowledged her exchanges with Roy, her attorneys argued that prosecutors had“cherry-picked”only those text messages that served their case against her, ignoring others in which Carter urged Roy toward help for his struggles.
But police said Carter deliberately misled friends and Roy’s family members in the days and hours before Roy died, claiming to them that he’d gone missing at the same time the two of them were in contact and he was planning his suicide.
On Monday the U.S. Supreme Courtdeclined to hear Carter’s appeal of her conviction, after the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court also upheld the conviction.
Seven months into serving her 15-month sentence, Carter had sought permission from the Massachusetts parole board toto be released. In September, that request was denied.
source: people.com
