An all-star defense team — including a former federal judge and an attorney who defended Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — are representing Michelle Carter in her pitch to have the state’s highest court throw out her unprecedented involuntary manslaughter conviction. 
 
 Carter was given a 2 1⁄2-year jail sentence, with only 15 months to serve, last summer after Judge Lawrence Moniz found that she was responsible for Conrad Roy III’s suicide in July 2014. ||||| Defense attorneys for texting suicide defendant Michelle Carter are asking the state's highest court to review her conviction for involuntary manslaughter, arguing that the ruling in her case was unlawful and violated the Constitution. 
 
 And on her side is a new team of attorneys with experience in some of Massachusetts' highest-profile legal controversies, including the defense of Boston Marathon bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev and the overturning of thousands of convictions linked to disgraced drug lab chemist Annie Dookhan. 
 
 The case against Carter, accused of pressuring her on-and-off again boyfriend into killing himself, gained international attention and became a flash point in debates over mental health, contemporary teenage relationships and the limits of free speech. 
 
 "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 February application for the Supreme Judicial Court 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." 
 
 Conrad 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 courts. 
 
 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. 
 
 "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 in a statement from the bench. 
 
 Carter's defense team had offered a range of defenses, pointing to Roy's history of depression and a previous suicide attempt as the true cause of his death, using an expert witness who argued that Carter's judgment was altered by the antidepressants she was taking and disputing whether her fateful phone conversation with Roy occurred as described by the prosecution. 
 
 But Moniz sided with Bristol County prosecutors, ruling, in effect, that Carter's words could and did kill -- a decision without direct precedent in Massachusetts, which has no specific law against encouraging or assisting suicide. 
 
 On Feb. 5, Carter's defense team, bolstered by a new group of high-profile litigators from the Boston law firm Fick & Marx LLP, petitioned to have the state's Supreme Judicial Court hear the appeal directly, rather than going through the Massachusetts Appeals Court. 
 
 Their reason, in part, is that they intend to claim that Carter's conviction violated both the U.S. and Massachusetts constitutions, according to Carter's application for direct appellate review. 
 
 "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." 
 
 The appeal will question whether categorizing the encouragement of suicide as involuntary manslaughter violates the First and Fifth Amendements of the U.S. Constitution and Article 12 of the Massachusetts constitution, according to the application. Such an interpretation may be an "unconstitutionally vague criminal offense" that allows arbitrary enforcement and criminalizes reckless speech, Carter's attorneys wrote. 
 
 And the review application parses the language of Moniz' ruling to argue that he wrongly convicted Carter of a crime for which she was not charged. A grand jury indicted Carter for committing "wanton and reckless conduct" that constituted manslaughter. Moniz said in his ruling that Carter was also guilty because she had failed to seek help for Roy after putting his life in danger. 
 
 Carter's defense attorneys argue in the filing that those are two separate types of involuntary manslaughter, and that Moniz should not have convicted her for type of crime for which she was not indicted. 
 
 Prosecutors disputed that claim in their response to the application, arguing that the Commonwealth had based its case on both types of involuntary manslaughter and that Moniz also cited Carter's wanton and reckless conduct in his ruling. 
 
 The application also raises whether Carter was wrongly convicted as a youthful offender rather than a juvenile, if Moniz wrongly treated Carter's text to a friend months after Roy's death as a reliable confession, if Moniz should have considered Carter's juvenile brain development in his verdict and if testimony from the defense's controversial psychological expert Dr. Peter Breggin was wrongly excluded. 
 
 Carter's defense team includes both Joseph Cataldo and Cornelius Madera, who represented her at trial, and three new attorneys from Fick & Marx with eye-catching track records. William Fick served as defense counsel for Tsarnaev, Nancy Gertner is a retired federal judge and a faculty member at Harvard Law School and Daniel Marx worked with the ACLU of Massachusetts to overturn convictions tainted by Dookhan's faulty drug testing. 
 
 Carter, who has been allowed to remain outside prison pending her appeals, filed notice of appeal in August of last year. Her case was entered into the Massachusetts Appeals Court on Jan. 8, but was was docketed without her name publicly attached and impounded. 
 
 That allowed the appeal to escape public notice for nearly two months, despite marking a significant development in a case which garnered national and international media attention. The filing of the appeal was first reported Friday by the Boston Herald. 
 
 Following standard procedures, the case remained impounded as Carter's defense team filed its application for review by the SJC on Feb 5 and the Commonwealth responded on Feb. 16. But after questions about the appeal from the Herald, the SJC Clerk's Office reviewed the case and found that some elements should have been made public. 
 
 "The clerk's office determined that lower court's designation of matter as impounded was in error and changed the designation to partially impounded," the SJC's clerk's office told MassLive. 
 
 Massachusetts Appeals Court Clerk Joseph Stanton confirmed the error and apologized, saying it was due to a coding mistake when the case was first entered into the Appeals Court's system.
– Attorneys for the Massachusetts woman who stood trial for pressuring her on-again off-again boyfriend into suicide while they were teens want her involuntary manslaughter conviction overturned. Michelle Carter's new team of lawyers, who are petitioning the state's highest court, said last month that the case against the now 21-year-old was unlawful. "Nothing in Massachusetts law made clear to 17-year-old Carter, or anyone else, that such circumstances could constitute involuntary manslaughter," read the application to Massachusetts Supreme Court, per MassLive. Carter was convicted in June in connection with the 2014 death of her long-distance boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, after she sent text messages to him that appeared to encourage him to take his own life in what became sensationally known as the "texting suicide case." After being found guilty, Carter was sentenced to 15 months in prison plus five years probation. Now, her attorneys have asked the Supreme Judicial court to directly hear her appeal. Among the litigators who've been newly hired to Carter's team is the attorney who defended Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, William Fick. According to the Boston Herald, Fick is joined by former federal judge Nancy Gertner, who told the paper she and her fellow counsel were "troubled by the result of the case" and believe it deserves Supreme Court review. The attorneys wrote in their petition that the case could set a precedent for prosecuting future defendants "for encouraging suicide with words alone." Carter, meanwhile, has not served jail time since her conviction after the judge ruled she could remain free pending all her state appeals.