Michelle Carter v. Massachusetts

Michelle Carter’s conviction for involuntary manslaughter in connection with Conrad Roy III’s suicide is unprecedented. Massachusetts is the only state to have affirmed the conviction of a physically absent defendant who encouraged another person to commit suicide with words alone. Before this case, no state had interpreted its common law or enacted an assistedsuicide statute to criminalize such “pure speech,” and no other defendant had been convicted for encouraging another person to take his own life where the defendant neither provided the actual means of death nor physically participated in the suicide. This petition presents the questions whether Carter’s conviction for involuntary manslaughter violated the U.S. Constitution in two distinct ways:

1. Whether Carter’s conviction for involuntary manslaughter, based on words alone, violated the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, because her communications, which were found to have caused Roy’s suicide, did not constitute speech that was “an integral part of conduct in violation of a valid criminal statute,” Giboney v. Empire Storage & Ice Co., 336 U.S. 490, 498 (1949)?

2. Whether Carter’s conviction violated the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, because in assisted or encouraged suicide cases, the common law of involuntary manslaughter fails to provide reasonably clear guidelines to prevent “arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement,” McDonnell v. United States, 136 S.Ct. 2355, 2373 (2016) (internal quotations omitted)?