Warning: This post is about a suicide case and may be triggering for some readers.
Michelle Carter was 17 when she helped convince her 18-year-old boyfriend Conrad Roy to end his life in July 2014.
Roy was about to go through with his plan, when he sent a message to Carter telling her he was afraid.
“Get back [to it],” she told him. It was the final blow in what had been a series of ‘you can do it’ messages talking Roy into suiciding.
In June 2017, Carter was convicted for involuntary manslaughter. Just a few months later, she was sentenced to two and a half years in prison – and only required to serve 15 months of that.
But in the 18 months since, the now-22-year-old hasn’t set foot inside a prison. She’s been allowed out on bail while awaiting the results of a high court appeal.
On Thursday she learned that’s likely about to change. Massachusetts’ highest court told her it would uphold her conviction, The Washington Post reports.
“After she convinced him to get back [to taking his own life], she did absolutely nothing to help him,” Justice Scott Kafker said.
“She did not call for help or [try to save him] as she listened to him die.”
While her lawyers have said they are considering taking her appeal to the US Supreme Court, the county’s District Attorney is filing a motion for her to begin serving her sentence behind bars right away.
The preceding trial made headlines around the world because of both the urgency of Carter’s messages to Roy, and the way their relationship played out almost entirely over text message – the pair had only met in person a handful of times, AAP reports.
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