People, please start believing that health care IS the miracle God sent you.

Four bolts of cloth? Friend, those are teenage bride prices.

Ugh. I think you have just given Kirk Cameron the idea for his next movie.

Dude. DUDE! This is so emphatically not okay. It would be weird enough to do this with your daughter’s permission, but to go behind her back to pimp her out to the fundie bro of your dreams is mega-gross. Of course, it also sounds like the premise of some dreary Christian “romantic comedy”, but that’s another issue…

That’s not how the insanity defense works. It’s not about her morals. For the insanity defense to succeed, her lawyers must prove to the court that she did not understand what she was doing; that she failed to know right from wrong; that she acted on an uncontrollable impulse or some combination of these factors.

But the fact that she said her family would hate her and the police would come for her, and that she tried to make sure he had deleted their conversations does indicate she knew what she was doing was both morally wrong and illegal. Just claiming she thought she was helping him isn’t enough of a defence when she…

I appreciate your point. She’s dangerous, though, and needs to be kept from doing harm to others in the future one way or another. How that happens is less important to me than that it does happen.

I don’t understand your point. If you’re trying to say she could mount a successful insanity defense even though she understood the consequences of her actions because she did not believe her actions were “morally wrong,” you’re completely wrong about that.

I’m not the person you were responding to, but I was suicidal as a teenager and I never, ever, ever thought about hurting anyone but myself. I also have friends who were/are suicidal and I was only ever concerned for their well-being and trying to make them feel better about their lives. I really don’t know how being…

The teenage psyche might be influenced by an influx of hormones, but this is something on an entirely different level. It’s pretty easy to make it to adulthood if you’re not an absolute monster or involved with someone who is, as this girl seems to be.

She demonstrated knowledge that what she was doing was wrong, would cause his family to hate her and for the police to come after her. Even in the presence of serious psychological issues which I would argue are not evident here, this ability to discern right from wrong prevents her from using the insanity defense.

ETA: holy shit, the teenage psyche is just so complicated and crazy and I don’t know how any of us made it out and became semi-functioning sort-of adults.

Except for the fact that in the lead-up to the death she tried to make sure he deleted the texts where she goaded him on, and afterward she was worried she would get arrested. That indicates to me that she fully realized that what she was doing was wrong and illegal. If she was just a confused young girl who thought…

I had no knowledge of this case before reading this. After reading it, holy hell she was pushing him to kill himself. It's not like they got into a fight and she told him to kill himself. She was systemically working on him until he did it. She really does need to go some place where she's not a danger to others.

This is definitely one of those grey areas, but I think this sort of thing should be prosecuted. Because smart, manipulative people love to exploit fuzzy grey areas. This seems like a dangerous girl who wanted to hurt someone, but was smart enough to realize she would be far less likely to suffer consequences if she…

He may have been on the fence, but I have never seen anyone try so hard to push someone off it

There’s a very big difference between being mentally ill and criminally insane.

Mental illness doesn’t get you off crime if you still know right from wrong.

“He sent the message at 6:25 p.m., then told his mother he was leaving the house to visit a friend and not to expect him home for dinner. He made a short drive to a remote corner of the Fairhaven Kmart parking lot. At 6:28 p.m., he called Carter and talked to her for 43 minutes. At 7:12, she called him. The call…

Living in Massachusetts, I have been following the case since her arrest and what she did was seriously messed up.