Michelle Carter isn’t innocent, but that doesn’t mean she’s guilty

Michelle Carter was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter for persuading her boyfriend to kill himself through a series of text messages.

It only takes a quick scroll through the comments of any article about Carter to see that society has more or less made up their mind about her. Black widow is one that pops up a lot. Bitch, cunt, and fucking whore all appear regularly, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any comments section that doesn’t have those.

Cases around attractive young women are always punctured by psycho-sexual projections from onlookers, and this one is no exception — to the detriment of both Carter and her now-deceased boyfriend, Conrad Roy.

While the media and spectators as a whole foam at the mouth to paint the case a black-and-white case of all-but-murder, the mental health issues of both then-teenagers are all but totally ignored. Mental illness doesn’t abdicate any party of total responsibility, but it is a lens that needs to be looked through in order to fully see this case for what it was: two mentally ill kids in a fucked-up relationship online that ended tragically. That’s it. It wasn’t a murder, it wasn’t an assisted suicide. It was a tragedy.

Michelle Carter’s mental instability is as chronicled as her texts to Roy, but largely ignored in all but the footnotes of daily court recaps. Her time in an institution has been regularly alluded to, as have her eating disorders and dramatic and rapid weight fluctuations, claims of help harm and her own planned suicide attempts. Her antidepressant — like most — has a registered and well-known side effect of possibly increasing suicidal urges. She came with what her attorney called “baggage” and he wasn’t wrong. And that’s to say nothing of Roy’s own extensive psychiatric record, including another suicide attempt and numerous expressions to his father that he wanted to kill himself. Roy even told Carter they should pull a Romeo and Juliet. They were two teens too tangled up in each other and their problem and issues and chemical imbalances to claw their way out.

Another factor in the case either not discussed or roundly dismissed was the issue of Carter and Roy’s almost exclusively online relationship. They only ever met three times in person, exchanging thousands of messages over the course of their years together. The removal of in-person consequence means their relationship wasn’t real the way they thought it was. Virtually every teenager since the early aughts has been forced to attend school-sanctioned cyberbullying seminars, and the soundbite repeated over and over again is that “writing though the screen feels inconsequential.”

Everyone knows it’s easier to act tough online. We heard it so much in school, it’s a brain autocomplete like the oft-meme’d factoid about mitochondria being (say it with me now) the powerhouse of the cell. Again, this is inexcusable. I’d venture to say that in most teens’ years of Myspace-cum-Facebook teasing, no one openly and actively encouraged suicide. But to pretend like these two kids, then teenagers, weren’t wrapped up in a cyber “romance” that played out into this now-national tragedy is just wrong.

To discuss and sentence Carter like she was a callous, calculated, Gone Girl-style villainess in her right mind wouldn’t just be cruel — it’d be a gross injustice. She’s unstable, hurt, mentally ill, but because she’s the one who made it out alive, she’s our target. By no means should Michelle Carter be free, but jail isn’t the place for her. She’s a young woman who needs help, not eternal damnation. Institution, not incarceration.