Michelle Carter to Appeal After Being Convicted for Urging Boyfriend to Kill Himself

08/31/2017 06:32 pm EDT

Michelle Carter and her legal team are appealing her involuntary manslaughter conviction. She was found guilty of urging her boyfriend to kill himself in a series of texts and phone conversations.

Earlier this month, the Massachusetts woman was sentenced to serve 15 months in jail. However, Judge Lawerence Moniz stayed the sentence to allow time for the appeals process.

Joseph Cataldo, Carter's attorney, explained after the initial ruling that they were planning to appeal and that the process "could take months, years," according to PEOPLE.

At this time, it remains unclear whether Cataldo plans to appeal the conviction, the sentence, or both.

The crime took place in 2014, when Carter, who was 17 at the time, urged 18-year-old Conrad Roy III to go through with his plan to take his own life.

Roy's body was found by the authorities on July 13, 2014. He was discovered in his pickup truck in a parking lot where he had attached a hose to a portable generator to fill the cab with carbon monoxide.

Carter and Roy met several years before he committed suicide when they were on separate vacations in Florida. The two lived about an hour apart in Massachusetts, Carter in Plainville and Roy in Fairhaven. After the vacation, they continued to contact each other via phone calls, emails, and texts.

Investigators discovered a series of text messages exchanged between Roy and Carter following his suicide. In the week prior to his death, the two exchanged more than 1,000 texts.

"You always say you're gonna do it, but you never do," one message from Carter to Roy read. "I just want to make sure tonight is the real thing."

In other messages, Carter said, "You just have to do it," and "It's painless and quick."

The police later found a message from Carter to a friend in which she said that during a phone call with Roy that he had left his truck and said he didn't want to go through with committing suicide.

"Get back in," Carter said that she told Roy.

Cataldo says that his client "regrets what happened." During the trial, he also claimed that Carter had accepted responsibility for her actions. The defense attorney mentioned that Carter was dealing with mental health issues of her own as she had struggled with eating disorders.

"This sad, tragic manslaughter was a very unusual set of circumstances unique to these two individuals who were both struggling with mental health issues themselves," Cataldo said.

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