Michelle Carter

In this Aug. 24, 2015 file photo, Michelle Carter listens to defense attorney Joseph P. Cataldo argue for an involuntary manslaughter charge against her to be dismissed at Juvenile Court in New Bedford, Mass.

(Peter Pereira)

The case of Michelle Carter, the Plainville teenager accused of encouraging her boyfriend's suicide, has been referred to the full Supreme Judicial Court.

Carter's legal battle continues to inch its way toward a resolution. More than two months after defense attorney Joseph Cataldo filed an appeal seeking the dismissal of the case, Supreme Judicial Court Justice Margot Botsford has made her decision -- one that does not bring the matter closer to an end.

Botsford referred the case to the full Supreme Judicial Court and is targeting a May hearing, according to her Feb. 1 ruling. At that hearing, the court will decide whether the manslaughter charge against Carter can go forward, whether Carter should be charged as a juvenile or whether the case should be dismissed entirely.

Carter has been charged in the death of Mattapoisett 18-year-old Conrad Roy, and is accused of repeatedly encouraging his suicide by text message until he took his own life in July, 2014.

Cataldo has maintained that however tragic Roy's death, his client has committed no crime and should not be charged as an adult.

"This is clearly just speech," Cataldo said in a courthouse interview in November, "There was no physical action taken by Michelle Carter in connection with the death. It was just words alone. And words alone need to be a true threat in order not to be protected by the first amendment."

The criminal case has stretched on for nearly a year. Carter was charged with involuntary manslaughter in February of 2015. In September Taunton Juvenile Court Judge Bettina Borders rejected Cataldo's motion to dismiss the charge, allowing the case to move forward and for Carter to be charged as a "youthful offender" -- a status that allows harsher punishments than typical juvenile cases and for court files to be open to public inspection. Free speech, Borders ruled, does not extend to encouraging suicide.

Cataldo then an appeal to a single justice of the state Supreme Judicial Court and the district attorney's office filed a response in November.

The lengthy proceedings could make prosecutors' jobs more difficult, according to South Coast Today. If the Supreme Judicial Court rules that Carter should be tried as a juvenile, her trial must begin before her 20th birthday on August 11. Prosecutors said in a court hearing Tuesday that such a time frame could limit their ability to prepare for the case, South Coast Today reported.

In early December the Bristol County District Attorney's office denied a request from MassLive for the prosecution's response to the appeal, saying that it referenced grand jury minutes and was a sealed filing.

Roy, who had been engaged in a largely online relationship with Carter, drove from his mother's house to a Kmart parking lot in July, 2014. He started a portable engine inside the cabin of his truck, and left it running until he died of carbon monoxide poisoning. A trail of text messages, released in an unsealed indictment, show that Carter encouraged him to kill himself, and urged him to follow through when in his last minutes he exited the truck, afraid of dying.

Prosecutors allege that Carter led a campaign of encouragement that directly led to the death of Roy, who had graduated from Old Rochester Regional High School that June.

"Carter assisted Conrad's suicide by counseling him to overcome his doubts," the indictment reads. "Her counsel took the form of positive direction, where she told him he was 'strong' enough to execute the suicide plan and would be happy once he was dead."

The text messages included in court filings show Carter, in between professions of love, advocating for suicide as Roy's best option after an extended period of depression. "It's painless and quick," she wrote in one text. "Everyone will be sad for a while but they will get over it and move on," she wrote in another. She urged him not to delay the act, and advised him to find alternative methods of producing carbon monoxide when it became clear his truck's diesel engine would not work.

The case has drawn national attention and shed light on a knotty legal intersection between free speech, harassment and, according to prosecutors, manslaughter. There is little precedent for cases involving defendants encouraging victims to kill themselves, and Massachusetts does not have a specific law prohibiting assisted suicide.

The prosecution has portrayed Carter as an active participant in Roy's death -- one who, after the fact, pretended to have no knowledge of the plan. She texted with Roy's relatives, asking where he was in the hours before his body was found in the Kmart parking lot.