ENG 112: Dual Enrollment: College Composition II (Woodgrove HS-Loudoun)

In July 2014, following her advice to “just park your car and sit there and it will take, like, 20 minutes,” Roy pumped carbon monoxide into the cab of his pickup truck in the parking lot of a Kmart. [...]the defense relied heavily on the testimony of a controversial psychiatrist, Peter Breggin, a critic of the pharmaceutical industry and author of “Talking Back to Prozac.” Unlike 40 other states, Massachusetts has no law against assisted suicide, and the prosecution appeared to go beyond the scope of the existing law, said Sharon Beckman, a law professor at Boston College.

Michelle Carter, the Massachusetts woman convicted in June of involuntary manslaughter for encouraging a close friend, through text messages and phone calls, to commit suicide, was sentenced on Thursday to 15 months in a county jail.

Cell phones are a ubiquitous necessity in our fast-paced twentyfirst century lives. All one needs to do is look around at a bus stop, class room, or restaurant to see most Americans immersed in their handheld devices. Whether you believe this is a positive indication of the role of technology within our daily lives or not, the fact remains that most of us use our hand-held devices on a daily basis. So, what happens when that technology, or more specifically the content of the messages sent on the device, induces a person to take their own life?. This situation begs a secondary question--should the justice system hold individuals criminally liable for what they say over text message in the same way that they are held liable when they speak to someone in person? Recent case law indicates that at least some jurisdictions--the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court case of Michelle Carter as a prime example--are willing to prosecute individuals for the content of their text messages, particularly when it results in suicide. Yet this raises still more interesting questions loaded with First Amendment implications. Do we have freedom of speech rights on our hand-held devices? If our text messages lead another to harm themselves are we then criminally liable? Finally, if the speech in question does not fall into one of the traditionally unprotected categories of speech does the First Amendment preclude criminal prosecution?

A prosecutor told a judge Thursday that a former nurse used the Internet to advise, encourage and assist two people to kill themselves, making him guilty of criminally aiding suicide.

An ex-nurse accused of seeking depressed people online and encouraging two to kill themselves was found guilty Tuesday of aiding the suicides of an English man and Canadian woman.

The court ruled that the language in the state's assisted-suicide law that pertains to "encouraging" suicide is unconstitutional. However, it upheld the part of the law that bans "assisting" suicide. Wednesday's decision sends the case back to the lower court.