Michelle Carter to Leave Prison for Good Behavior

Michelle Carter, the teenager convicted of involuntary manslaughter in June 2017 after urging her boyfriend to take his own life via text message in 2014, is leaving prison today.

In February 2019, Carter was sentenced to two and a half years in jail with the expectation that she would serve 15 months (the rest was suspended, with five years probation to follow) at the Bristol County House of Correction in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. Now 23 years old, Carter will be released months early, on Thursday, January 23, for good behavior, ABC reports.

“Ms. Carter has been a model inmate here at the Bristol County House of Corrections,” Jonathan Darling, spokesman at the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office told CNN. “She has participated in a variety of programs, held a job inside the jail, has been polite to our staff and volunteers, has gotten along with the other inmates, and we’ve had no discipline issues with her whatsoever.”

In July 2014, Carter’s boyfriend Conrad Roy III died by suicide. He sat inside his Ford F-250 truck in Fairhaven, Massachusetts and inhaled carbon monoxide. Prior to his death, Carter sent Roy text messages encouraging him to “get back in” the vehicle, even though he expressed having second thoughts.

In July 2019, Carter appealed to the Supreme Court to review her case. According to NBC, the court refused to take it, declining to “decide whether her involuntary manslaughter conviction violated the First Amendment guarantee of free speech because it was based solely on words that she texted or spoke.”