This story is part of MassLive's ongoing coverage of the Michelle Carter trial.

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Michelle Carter has been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the death of her boyfriend Conrad Roy, ending a trial which captured national attention and raised profound questions about mental health, suicide and freedom of speech.

Judge Lawrence Moniz issued the verdict Friday morning, ruling that verbally pressuring someone into suicide can be considered manslaughter in Massachusetts. Carter had waived her right to a jury trial and faces up to 20 years in prison.

Members of Roy's family wept quietly, before and after the verdict was read. Joseph Cataldo, Carter's attorney, placed his arm around her shoulder as the judge read his statement; she sat, for the most part, stock still, before appearing to shake her head slightly, rest her head on her hand and cry after she was declared guilty.

Moniz' decision comes nearly three years after Roy killed himself by filling the cabin of his pickup truck with carbon monoxide using a gas-powered water pump. Prosecutors had argued that Carter was responsible for Roy's death, citing dozens of text messages in which Carter encouraged, cajoled, pressured and guilted Roy into following through with the suicide plan.

In a statement before his ruling, Moniz said that it was phone calls between Roy and Carter as he sat in the truck -- not the chain of text messages in the prior days -- that caused Roy's death. She told friends that she heard him die on the phone; she told one, Samantha Boardman, that he left the truck because he was "scared" and she told him to "f------ get back in."

Though the defense attempted to argue that her accounts of those moments may not have been accurate, Moniz found them credible -- and found that she had committed the wanton and reckless conduct, leading to a predictable loss of life, needed to prove a manslaughter charge.

"She instructed him to get back in the truck which she has reason to know is becoming a toxic environment to human life," Moniz said.

She also had a legal obligation to call for help once her actions put Roy's life in danger, the judge said -- and that she failed to do so. He cited Commonwealth v. Levesque, a case in which two people living in an abandoned building in Worcester started a fire and failed to report it, leading to the deaths of six firefighters.

The defense in that case argued that their charges of involuntary manslaughter should be dismissed because the defendants had no legal duty to report the fire. But the Supreme Judicial Court found there was an obligation to prevent harm from a danger that they caused -- as there was for Carter after she told Roy to get back in the truck, Moniz said.

"Ms. Carter took no action," Moniz said. "She admitted in subsequent texts that she did nothing."

Testimony in the trial, which took place over six days within the glass-and-stone confines of the Taunton Trial Court, alternated between the sensational and the mundane. Police officers, in the clipped, clinical patois of law enforcement, described both the tools they used to search through cell phones and the moments in a Fairhaven Kmart parking lot when Roy's missing person case turned into an investigation of an unattended death.

It featured matters of the heart, as the prosecution and defense offered contrasting stories of what troubles lived within these two teenagers, and of the body, as when prosecutors displayed photographs of Roy's lifeless form inside his truck, drawing cries of distress from his family members in the courtroom.

It was a case built on thousands of text messages, projected on a white screen in spreadsheets and revealing in raw detail Roy's and Carter's intimate concerns, as well as reams of other documentary evidence: notebooks and the suicide notes inside them, medical examiners' reports, confessional videos from Roy a month before his death.

And it was a case that turned on the questioning of those who knew Roy and Carter best. Carter's friends and acquaintances described her social insecurities, struggles with an eating disorder and desperate need for validation, as well as her potentially incriminating accounts of phone calls she had with Roy as he sat in his truck that night.

"Sam, [the police] read my messages with him I'm done," Carter wrote to Boardman after officers seized Roy's phone. "His family will hate me and I can go to jail."

Prosecutors and defense attorneys sparred over weighty legal questions: whether Carter's text messages were constitutionally protected free speech, or whether they constituted the wanton and reckless conduct needed to prove a manslaughter charge.

"What we're dealing with is a suicide and not a homicide," defense attorney Joseph Cataldo said during closing arguments.

"You can encourage someone to die via text, and you can commit a crime via text," Assistant District Attorney Katie Rayburn responded.

But they also crafted stories about who Roy and Carter were -- a particular necessity in a case where the physical circumstances of death were not in question, and where exact conversations between victim and suspect were preserved as text messages and were not in dispute.

Prosecutors described Carter as an emotionally needy, deceptive manipulator who drove Roy to suicide to gain the validation she had long craved -- to win the title of "grieving girlfriend." They highlighted the page-length texts she sent to her school and camp friends and those friends' testimony that her need for affection was sometimes overwhelming. They suggested she was trying to socially profit off of Roy's suicide, pointing to her desire for "credit" when she organized a memorial baseball tournament and her request that Roy tweet about her before he killed himself.

And they emphasized her untruthfulness, when in the days after Roy's death she expressed grief and surprise to family and friends while neglecting to mention the dozens of messages she exchanged with him planning his suicide in detail and encouraging him to follow through.

Roy, they argued, was a victim - a severely depressed young man whose desire to live and fight through his struggles was undermined by a young woman he trusted.

But for the defense, those roles were in some ways reversed. Defense attorney Joseph Cataldo highlighted both Roy's long history of suicidality, including multiple prior suicide attempts, and Carter's own mental health struggles. Roy, the defense said, was an older boy who planned and executed his suicide of his own volition, dragging a woman who struggled with anorexia and depression along with him.

They put a spotlight on messages Carter sent around the time of Roy's 2012 suicide attempt, in which she tried to convince him to get help. They introduced computer search histories and other text messages which showed him researching suicide methods before Carter encouraged him to follow through. They presented a series of texts in which Roy compared their relationship to Romeo and Juliet -- and emphasized the play's climax of mutual suicide.

"We should be like Romeo and Juliet at the end," Roy texted on June 26, a week before Carter began encouraging him to kill himself.

"Haha I'd love to be your Juliet :)," Carter replied.

"But do you know what happens in the end," Roy wrote.

"OH YEAH F--- NO! WE ARE NOT DYING." Carter answered.

And Cataldo brought controversial psychiatric expert witness Dr. Peter Breggin to the stand to argue that Carter was "involuntarily intoxicated" by the antidepressant Celexa during the weeks she encouraged Roy to kill himself.

Breggin, who prosecutors had tried to prevent from serving as a witness, has built a career outside of psychiatry's mainstream, testifying in trials and writing books blaming antidepressants for mental instability and violence. Under cross-examination Tuesday, he said he does not believe depression has a physical cause, contradicting medical consensus that it is linked to chemical imbalances in the brain.

And in seven hours of testimony spread over two days, Breggin argued that Celexa had caused Carter to "transform" from someone dedicated to helping others into a delusional manic-depressive.

"During this time we see her having adverse reactions to the drugs. A remarkable nightmare series ... in which the devil actually tells her to kill herself," Breggin said.

Prosecutors aggressively challenged Breggin's diagnosis, arguing he had completely changed his opinion on her prior mental health after initially failing to review her psychiatric history. Breggin's cross-examination featured a constant push-and-pull with Assistant District Attorney Katie Rayburn, who he accused of interrupting him when she asked repeatedly for him to directly answer questions rather than indulge in discursive opinions about Carter's character.

In his explanation of his ruling, Moniz said he did not find Breggin's testimony credible.

Carter and Roy met in 2012 while visiting relatives in Naples, Florida. They struck up an off-and-on relationship that was conducted almost entirely via texts and Facebook messages, but was also searingly intimate in its discussions of depression, eating disorders and emotional frailty. They confided in each other, about his 2012 suicide attempt, and about her struggles with an eating disorder.

After Roy was found dead on July 13, 2014, Carter texted his mother and sister to offer support, without mentioning the weeks of text messages in which she had advised Roy on how to kill himself and urged him to follow through. Months later, after discovering their text conversations on Roy's phone, police officers interviewed Carter at her high school and seized her cell phone.

In February of 2015, Carter was charged with involuntary manslaughter as a youthful offender -- a classification that allowed for more severe sentencing than a typical juvenile charge. Her attorney kicked off a lengthy series of appeals, which ended before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. On July 1, 2016, the justices rejected the defense's arguments about free speech and adolescent brain development and ruled that Carter could stand trial.

Now, two and a half years after charges were filed and a month before the third anniversary of Roy's death, the case is over, leaving Carter facing up to 20 years in prison. Her defense team has not yet stated whether they plan to appeal the verdict.