Bullying Our First Amendment
Bullying our First Amendment?
CASE STUDY: Texting, Bullying, and Free Speech
It is hard to decide where the freedoms granted
by the First Amendment start and end. We can
agree on certain problematic utterances that we
wouldn’t say out loud, but are we confident
enough in these judgments to legally punish
these speech acts—and other similar ones we don’t anticipate? This was the
conundrum brought up by the case of 17 year-old Michelle Carter, who convinced
her boyfriend Conrad Roy III to commit suicide. Carter helped Roy construct his
method of suicide, then followed with a month of persuading him into finalizing
the plan. Through a barrage of text messages over the course of a month, she
convinced him to go through the plan by explaining that “everyone will be sad for
a while, but will get over it and move on” and telling him that “the time was right
and he’s ready, he just needed to do it!” On what would be his final day alive,
Carter texted Roy informing him “that if he didn’t do it now he’d never do it” and
then made him “promise” to follow through. The following morning Roy was
found dead in his car from inhalation of carbon monoxide. In court, Carter was
found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and the legal arguments centered over
whether these texts actually and primarily caused Roy’s death.
Should Carter have been convicted of involuntary manslaughter from texts
messages sent to her boyfriend? The case against Carter was motivated largely by
the idea that bullying with words is harmful and should be equated to physical
actions in such extreme cases. Roy did not seem intent on committing suicide until
the repeated urgings of Carter occurred. As Jason Le Miere reports, he attempted to
abort the suicide attempt through carbon monoxide poisoning instigated by her
texts, but then resumed his efforts after she messaged him to “get back in” the car
that was slowly filling with lethal gas. If bullying can cause psychological and
physical harm, society ought to have an ethical and legal justification to punish
those who use speech in this way. Those making this argument also believe that
punishing such cases of harmful words will hopefully stop future cases of
cyberbullying. According to many, Carter went too far with her negative text
messages and was the primary cause of her boyfriend’s act of suicide.
Those defending Carter from legal responsibility for murder argued that “speech
that is reckless, hateful and ill-willed nevertheless enjoys First Amendment
protection.” They believe that while the words can be potentially hurtful, the act of
sending a text message is not equivalent to pulling a trigger and killing someone
with a gun. The boyfriend’s actions, while related to the speech of Carter, were not
the only possible result of hearing those words. Such an argument might go that
however mean and callous her utterances were, his reaction to them was of his own
free choosing. Professor Laurie Levenson of Loyola Law School points out one
challenge of finding Carter guilty of manslaughter: “What it does is just put people
on notice that there could be extreme enough cases where prosecutors and judges
find that [speech] has become homicide. Up to now ordinarily, we don’t find that
mere remarks to a victim are sufficient.” The Director of the American Civil
Liberty Union’s Massachusetts affiliate, Matthew Segal, voices similar worries:
“This is a killing in which the murder weapon was words, and that is an incredibly
broad view of causation and an incredibly broad view of the manslaughter laws in
Massachusetts and creates serious concerns about expanding criminal law without
doing so through the legislature.”
As Robby Soave points out, complicating matters in this case was Carter’s status
as a minor, as well as concerns about her struggling with mental illness. An
additional worry is sorting out what sort of ethical and legal precedent this decision
sets for cases of assisted suicide or euthanasia. As Matthew Segal speculates, “If
you have a couple who’ve been together for decades and one says to the other,
‘I’m in terrible pain,’ and the spouse responds with saying, ‘I don’t want to see you
go, but I think it’s the right thing for you, you should commit suicide,’ and then the
person does it, I gather in Massachusetts, the commonwealth’s view is that is a
crime and that spouse at our discretion can be put in prison for potentially a very
long period of time.” Many want to treat euthanasia and cyberbullying as different
types of actions, but the reasoning of this case shows how challenging it can be to
draw this moral and legal line. How should our speech be treated in cases where
others end up harming themselves?
Further Information:
Barbara Demick. “Woman who encouraged Boyfriend to kill himself via Text is sentenced to 15 Months in Jail.”
Los Angeles Times, August 3, 2017. Available at: http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-teen-texting-
suicide-20170803-story.html
Paul LeBlanc. “The Text Messages that led up to Teen’s Suicide.” CNN, June 16, 2017. Available at:
https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/08/us/text-message-suicide-michelle-carter-conrad-roy/index.html
Jason Le Miere. “What Michelle Carter’s Guilty Verdict for telling her Boyfriend to kill himself means for Free
Speech and Assisted Suicide.” Newsweek, June 16, 2017. Available at: http://www.newsweek.com/michelle-carter-
verdict-suicide-boyfriend-626910
Robby Soave. “Michelle Carter didn’t kill with a Text.” New York Times, June 16, 2017. Available at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/opinion/michelle-carter-didnt-kill-with-a-text.html
Authors:
Haley Turner & Scott R. Stroud, Ph.D.
Media Ethics Initiative
University of Texas at Austin
February 14, 2018
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