Michelle Carter was sentence to 2.5 years in prison for urging her boyfriend Conrad Roy III to commit suicide. Carter will only serve 15 months with the remainder of the balance suspended.
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On Thursday — less than two months after Carter was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter — Judge Lawrence Moniz of the Bristol County Juvenile Court of Massachusetts delivered the sentence.
BREAKING: Michelle Carter, woman found guilty of coercing boyfriend into killing himself via text messages, sentenced to 2.5 years in prison pic.twitter.com/cCWpogjp3X
— NBC News (@NBCNews) August 3, 2017
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In July 2014, Roy locked himself in his car, pumped it full of carbon monoxide and ended his own life. He was just 18 years old. Carter and Roy’s lengthy text exchanges ultimately helped investigators uncover her involvement in Roy’s suicide.
The question of whether or not Carter was at fault for telling her boyfriend to take his own life raised serious debate in the legal community. Throughout the investigation and trial, the case received global media attention due to the chilling nature of Carter and Roy’s text message correspondence.
As Roy questioned his plan to take his own life in the days leading up to his death, Carter urged him to end his personal suffering.
“Conrad. I told you I’ll take care of them,” Carter told Roy of his family, shortly before his death. “Everyone will take care of them to make sure they won’t be alone and people will help them get thru it. We talked about this, they will be okay and accept it. People who commit suicide don’t think this much and they just do it.”
During Roy’s final moments, Carter belittled him for attempting to “break” the “promise” he made to her that he would take his own life. In their last text exchange, Roy asked Carter where he should kill himself. “And u can’t break a promise. And just go in a quiet parking lot or something,” Carter told her boyfriend.
Correction: An earlier version of this story indicated that Ms. Carter would serve her entire sentence in prison.Â