The Massachusetts Supreme Judical Court will take on the appeal of Michelle Carter, the Plainville woman convicted last June of manslaughter for pressuring her boyfriend Conrad Roy III into killing himself.

On Wednesday, the SJC approved Carter's petition to bypass the Massachusetts Appeals Court in favor of review by the state's highest court.

In a February legal filing, Carter's newly bolstered defense team argued that her appeal raised novel legal questions and constitutional challenges that merited the SJC's attention.

"Carter is the first defendant to have been convicted of killing a person who took his own life, even though she neither provided the fatal means nor was present when the suicide occurred," Carter's lawyers wrote in their application for the SJC to take the case. "Nothing in Massachusetts law made clear to 17-year-old Carter, or anyone else, that such circumstances could constitute involuntary manslaughter."

Roy, 18, was found dead on July 13, 2014, in a Fairhaven Kmart parking lot after he turned on a gas-powered water pump and allowed the cabin of his truck to fill with carbon monoxide.

Carter, who was 17 years old when she sent Roy a barrage of texts and Facebook messages encouraging him to kill himself before his eventual suicide, was convicted of a count of involuntary manslaughter in Taunton Juvenile Court on June 16. She was sentenced to 15 months in jail, though her sentence has been stayed pending appeals in state court.

Judge Lawrence Moniz, who issued the verdict after Carter waived her right to a jury trial, ruled that Carter caused Roy's death by telling him over the phone to get back in his truck as it filled with the deadly gas.

In preparation for her appeal, Carter has hired additional attorneys with experience in major criminal controversies. William Fick, one of her new lawyers, helped defend Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; another, Daniel Marx, helped overturn convictions tainted by disgraced state drug lab chemist Annie Dookhan's faulty testing.

Her defense team also includes attorneys Joseph Cataldo and Cornelius Madera, who represented her at trial.

Her defense intends to argue both that Carter's conviction violated the U.S. and Massachusetts constitutions and that Moniz erred in the legal reasoning for his conviction.

"It will set precedent for who may be prosecuted for encouraging suicide with words alone," Carter's attorneys wrote. "In addition, the extraordinary public interest in this case, which implicates a major controversy about assisted suicide and which has garnered international attention, warrants immediate review by the Commonwealth's highest court."