Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com