Court OKs trial for girl who texted boyfriend urging suicide

BOSTON (AP) — A teenager who sent her boyfriend dozens of text messages encouraging him to take his own life and told him to "get back in" a truck filled with carbon monoxide fumes must stand trial for involuntary manslaughter, the state's highest court ruled Friday.

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled Friday that a grand jury had probable cause to indict Michelle Carter, then 17, in the 2014 death of Carter Roy III, 18.

[...] the court, in a strongly worded decision, said the grand jury heard evidence suggesting that Carter engaged in a "systematic campaign of coercion" that targeted Roy's insecurities and that her instruction to "get back in" his truck in the final moments of his life was a "direct, causal link" to his death.

"In sum, we conclude that there was probable cause to show that the coercive quality of the defendant's verbal conduct overwhelmed whatever willpower the eighteen year old victim had to cope with his depression, and that but for the defendant's admonishments, pressure, and instructions, the victim would not have gotten back into the truck and poisoned himself to death," Justice Robert Cordy wrote for the court in the unanimous ruling.

In addition to the text messages, prosecutors focused on a phone conversation Carter had with Roy while he was in his truck inhaling carbon monoxide fumes.