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Comment by marchenko | Hacker News Reader

This case stretches the theory of manslaughter to a point where it impinges on free speech. Not every evil act is an illegal act, and it is dangerous to over-extend legal theory to retroactively condemn a specific act.

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It may not be direct manslaughter, she's still an accomplice to his suicide. Encouraging a crime makes you as culpable as the person carrying it out.

Think of it as her spending years convincing her boyfriend to kill a third person. She'd be just as guilty.

I'd have charged her for complicity and conspiracy for first degree murder.

But suicide is not illegal in Mass.,so she is not an accomplice to any crime. She did not give any material or physical aid to help the victim effect his death, so it's hard to stretch this as assisted suicide, the closest related criminal charge (and it seems the prosecutor agrees as they charged her with manslaughter).

That would explain why she wasn't charged with murder. I didn't consider that most states define murder as a the killing of another person, which rules out suicide.

How is not being allowed to induce a mentally ill person to kill himself any more of an infringement of free speech than fraud or libel or perjury or conspiracy laws? The freedom of speech is a freedom to express oneself, not a freedom from consequences for any harmful action that can be accomplished through speaking.

She did not deceive him or collude with others to exert undue leverage over him. She made it clear that the intended result of the actions she advocated was death. She does not appear to have introduced the idea of suicide in the first place. She had no legal, physical, or economic control over him, was not in proximity to him during the suicide, and does not appear to have involved third parties at any time. He carried out an act that was legal for him to perform in large part because of her persuasive speech. Her words were chilling, but his act was the result of speech between two peers, and was not itself illegal.

Right or not, all speech is not protected. If you spill government secrets, you can be thrown in jail (assuming you aren't politically powerful). If you threaten someone, you could be prosecuted. Yelling fire in a crowded theater... Some of these are grey areas. I would say in this case, helping to convince someone who is obviously mentally ill that they should kill themself was decided to be one of those types of speech that is not protected.

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