Observers, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, criticized the verdict as an overreach. “Carter’s behavior was horrible, morally reprehensible, but I’m not sure that equates with legal responsibility,” said Daniel Medwed, professor of law at Northeastern University in Boston. He added that the verdict is likely to face appeal.

For some legal experts, Carter’s actions don’t live up to the standards for the crime. “Her behavior was horrible, but it doesn’t fit perfectly with involuntary manslaughter,” Daniel Medwed, a professor at Northwestern University School of Law, tells Rolling Stone. As he explains, a classic manslaughter charge involves “a direct reckless action” – for examples, […]

The ruling, which found that Carter’s texts led to Conrad’s death, could set a legal precedent, though experts remain split on the verdict. “As morally reprehensible as her behavior was, I wasn’t convinced that it was manslaughter,” said Daniel Medwed, a law and criminal-justice professor at Northeastern University.

Legal experts said the judge might have wanted to convey to Massachusetts lawmakers that they needed to pass laws to hold people accountable for their online conduct. “This sends a strong message to people that using technology to bully people into committing suicide will not be tolerated,” said Daniel S. Medwed, a law professor at […]

Carter was charged with involuntary manslaughter and tried in a juvenile court because she was 17 at the time of the suicide. Daniel Medwed, a law and criminal justice professor at Northeastern University, earlier told The Washington Post that Carter’s text messages arguably encouraged Roy. What prosecutors would have to prove during trial, he said, […]

Friday’s ruling will be closely watched by legal experts. “The wrinkle here is whether she coerced him or pressured him into doing something that he wasn’t in a position to rationally and autonomously decide to do because he was in such a depressive state,” said Daniel Medwed, professor of law and criminal justice at Northeastern […]

But little has been known about visceral fat and brain health in children. For a soon-to-be-published study, researchers from Northeastern University in Boston and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign tracked hundreds of 8-to-10-year-old children in a nine-month after-school exercise program in Urbana. Lauren Raine, a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University who conducted the study […]

Almost our entire arsenal of antibiotics was discovered in soil, but scientists haven’t gone digging for drugs in decades. That’s because, “screening microbial extracts from soil is thought to be a tapped-out approach,” said Waksman Institute of Microbiology scientist Richard Ebright. Soil has been “over-mined” agreed Kim Lewis, director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at […]

Despite the uniqueness of the location and individuals injured, there is much about the ballfield shooting that is absolutely textbook. Most obvious is the lack of randomness. Mass shootings, with or without fatalities, are rarely indiscriminate in terms of victim selection. Although the assailant, identified as 66-year-old James Hodgkinson of Belleville, IL, wasn’t gunning for […]

James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University and author of “Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder,” said it can be difficult to judge who is capable of violence amidst the noise of hyper-partisan online arguing. “There’s very, very few who would actually translate that into some aggressive act,” Fox said. “And there’s […]

Daniel Medwed, a law professor at Northeastern University, said the judge has a difficult task in determining whether Carter’s actions rise to the level of manslaughter. There is no Massachusetts law against encouraging someone to kill themselves. Medwed said the judge could consider Carter “morally blameworthy,” but “moral blame doesn’t always equal legal accountability. ”

But, while pundits consider the political fallout of Sessions’ testimony, there’s another legal matter that deserves some attention: the status of the complaints filed against Sessions with the Alabama state bar. Sessions has held his law license in the state of Alabama since 1973. Attorneys are largely self-regulated, beholden to ethical rules adopted in the […]