Words can kill, a Massachusetts Juvenile Court judge decided last Friday, when he found 20-year old Michelle Carter guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the 2014 suicide of her then-boyfriend, Conrad Roy III. This decision, with its broad interpretation of the manslaughter statute, could potentially pose long-lasting consequences for how we speak to each other online and how cyberbullying is addressed by social media platforms.

According to the prosecution, Carter spent the two weeks before Roy’s suicide texting him encouragement to kill himself. On July 12th, 2014, Roy drove to a remote Target parking lot and filled the cab of his truck with carbon monoxide from an external generator.

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Professor Robert Weisberg, faculty co-director at the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, isn’t so sure. “I think it’s a perfectly plausible interpretation of the involuntary-manslaughter statute,” he said. “The attraction of it for the prosecutor was that, although we now have lots of very specific cyberbullying statutes in various states, there’s nothing in our homicide statutes, generally, which limits the crime to a particular way of causing death. You have to cause death and you have to cause it with a certain mental state in which, in this case, it’s a kind of version of recklessness.”

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Here again, Weisberg disagrees. “My guess is that this will have very little effect on free speech,” he said. “If anything, it’s likely to embolden prosecutors” to try to imitate this interpretation in similar cases of suicide.

And whether this verdict even holds up on appeal is very much still up in the air. “There’s a good chance that the case the conviction can be overturned,” Weisberg said. “The boldest thing that the prosecutor did was argue that [Roy] would not have killed himself had it not been for her influence. Appellate-case law about causation makes it difficult to prove cause when there’s a suicide. There are cases where somebody commits a horrible assault on somebody else, like a sexual assault, and then the victim of the assault commits suicide. This is a different kind of case. This is kind of persuasion.”

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Criminalization certainly didn’t work on the war on drugs, but perhaps it could work in the war on being a jerk online. “I actually think if there were a legal intervention, that would make a difference [in moderating harassment and abuse online],” Weisberg said. “The involuntary-manslaughter case would be very rare (though, fortunately, very few people may end up like the victim here) but I think a serious threat of low-level cyberbullying convictions, misdemeanor convictions, could change behavior. I think that’s probably the way to go.”