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The Boston College student accused of texting her boyfriend to death actually pleaded with him not to kill himself and enlisted his family to help stop the suicide, according to newly revealed text messages.

The young woman, 21-year-old Inyoung You, was arraigned this morning in Massachusetts on charges of involuntary manslaughter. But earlier this week, her representatives released new evidence that casts the state’s story about You in doubt.

Back in October, Suffolk County prosecutors brought the charges against You with some fanfare, even holding a press conference specifically to announce them. You, they said, had used text messages to harass and pressure her boyfriend, 21-year-old Alexander Urtula, into committing suicide.

You and Urtula, who also went to Boston College, had dated for about a year and half. Urtula jumped from a parking garage to his death on May 20, 2019, the day he was supposed to graduate.

Suffolk County District Attorney (DA) Rachael Rollins told the media in October that You “had complete and total control” over Urtula “mentally and emotionally” and sent him messages that included “go kill yourself” and “go die.” A press release from the DA’s office implied that You had simply stood by as Urtula committed suicide, stating: “You was tracking Mr. Urtula’s location and went to the Renaissance garage and was present when he jumped.”

What the DA’s office left out was You’s side of the story—or any of Urtula’s part of the text exchange. Without such context, we don’t know if Urtula said or did anything to prompt messages like “go die,” or whether they were really meant literally, or what subsequent communications between the couple were like, or much of anything relevant to making a moral judgement, let alone determining whether You’s actions reach the level of manslaughter.

Now, another set of texts suggest that far from sitting by idly as Urtula killed himself, You frantically tried to find him and pleaded with him not to do it. These new texts were released to the Boston Globe by Rasky Partners Inc., a public relations firm that is representing You. Her legal defense team has confirmed them as authentic.

In texts sent not long before Urtula killed himself, You asks Urtula why he had turned off his phone’s location tracking and where he is. Urtula responds: “I’m not gonna be anywhere inyoung this is goodbye forever. I love you. This isn’t your fault it’s mine.”

“What. UR LEAVING ME,” You texts.

“I’m far away on a tall place and I’m not gonna be here for long. I’m leaving everyone,” Urtula texts back.

After this, You begins frantically texting him to stop and begging him not to do it. She says things like:

Please baby. i love you so much. Please stop please. Please baby please stop i love you.

And:

IM BEGGING YOU. PLEASE IM ALMOST THERE PLEASE. where are u please please please

You continues texting and texting, even as Urtula stops responding. “i’m so sorry if i hurt you PLEASE.” “please I’m so sorry i’m begging you please alex please.” “DONT DO THIS PLEASE.”

A full transcript of the messages is here. They do not at all conjure the picture that Suffolk County prosecutors did.

At some point before he jumped, Urtula turned the GPS tracking on his phone back on. You then began heading to where he was and also let his family know the location. “Please let me know if you get there first i’m waiting for the uber,” she texted Urtula’s brother.

You, who is a South Korean national, withdrew from Boston College in August and returned to her home country. She was out of the U.S. when a grand jury indicted her for manslaughter, and she only returned recently to be arraigned. On Friday, a Massachusetts judge set her bond at $5,000 and ordered her to stay in the state.

At the arraignment, the state dismissed the idea that You had tried to intervene to stop Urtula’s suicide. “The defendant had urged Urtula to kill himself on numerous occasions and on the morning of his death she knew exactly where to find him,” Suffolk County Prosecutor Caitlin Grasso alleged.

The state repeatedly brought up alleged comments You had made to Urtula earlier in their relationship, citing the fact that they had 75,000 total text messages between them and that witnesses supposedly said they had a toxic relationship.

But whatever mistakes You may have made in their relationship, reading their exchanges and looking at her actions from the day of his death makes it hard to imagine how prosecutors ever thought manslaughter charges were appropriate here, let alone why they’re doubling down on them. It’s even harder to reconcile the version of You that these messages reveals—anguished, loving, pleading, desperate—with the evil vixen sociopath that the state has repeatedly conjured for the media.

And it’s chilling to think of the precedent prosecutors are trying to set, one in which a romantic partner committing suicide is grounds to examine your entire text message and relationship history for signs that it’s your fault.

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“The Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee have unearthed enough evidence, in my opinion, to justify about three or four articles of impeachment against the president,” Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano tells Reason in a wide-ranging interview.

The allegations are not “enough to convict [the president] of bribery” in a court of law, Napolitano says, “but it’s enough to allege it for the purpose of impeachment” since impeachment is “not legal [but] political.” The former New Jersey Superior Court judge adds that while he thinks impeachment is “absolutely constitutional,” it is also “probably morally unjust.” Besides bribery, he lays out four more likely articles that he thinks House Democrats will bring against Trump.

“The second charge will be high crimes and misdemeanors, election law violation,” says Napolitano. “The third crime will be obstruction of justice. The fourth will be interference with a witness and the fifth may be lying under oath.”

“The evidence of his impeachable behavior at this point, in my view, is overwhelming,” he adds.

In two decades at the nation’s largest cable network, Napolitano has provided an unapologetically libertarian critique of state power regardless of the party holding control in the nation’s capital. In the past several months, he has emerged as one of Trump’s harshest critics, claiming back in May that the Mueller Report demonstrated that the president had clearly obstructed justice.

Though he thinks the recent House hearings provide grounds for impeachment, the judge finds it unlikely that the Republican-controlled Senate will vote to remove the president—and that the bigger problem is the way federal government continues to arrogate power to itself.

“No American president in the post–Woodrow Wilson era has stayed within the confines of the Constitution,” says Napolitano. “And each president has more authority than his predecessors, for the simple reason that Democratic Congresses give power to Democratic presidents and Republican Congresses give power to Republican presidents. That power stays in the presidency. So Donald Trump actually has more authority than Barack Obama did, who had more authority than George W. Bush did, etc.”

Napolitano argues that the federal government stays in power by “bribing” states and individuals with giveaways. The result, he says, is unsustainable debt that will ultimately undermine the economy and with it, social order. “The decline of certain types of cultural gatekeepers that said no [to] certain lifestyles obviously is liberating,” notes Napolitano. “But the same technology which lets me put the works of Thomas Aquinas in my pocket also lets the government follow me wherever I go and record whatever conversation I have with Gillespie or whoever I’m talking to, the Constitution be damned.”

Cameras by Jim Epstein and Kevin Alexander. Edited by Ian Keyser.

‘Comatose’ by Kai Engel is licensed under CC BY 4.0

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The Supreme Court just agreed to hear a case captioned,

TANZIN, FNU, ET AL. V. TANVIR, MUHAMMED, ET AL.

Fnu—what kind of a name is that? Danish? Afrikaner?

[Source: Prof. Lisa Davidson, The Atoms of Phonological Representation.]

No, just “First Name Unknown”; likely old hat to many of you, but I didn’t learn about it until eight years ago, when I saw United States v. FNU LNU (2d Cir. 2011). It’s a federal thing, by the way: A Westlaw search for na(fnu lnu) finds 2516 federal cases (99% since 1994) and only 41 state cases.

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Inmates at several West Virginia prisons are getting free electronic tablets to read books, send emails, and communicate with their families—but there’s a catch.

Any inmates looking to read Moby Dick may find that it will cost them far more than it would have if they’d simply gotten a mass market paperback, because the tablets charge readers by the minute.

Under a 2019 contract between the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation (WVDCR) and Global Tel Link (GTL), the company that is providing electronic multimedia tablets to 10 West Virginia prisons, inmates will be charged 3 cents a minute to read books, even though the books all come from Project Gutenberg, a free online library of more than 60,000 texts in the public domain.

The WVDCR says the tablets provide access to educational materials, incentives for good behavior, and an easy way to stay in touch with loved ones. But the Appalachian Prison Book Project, a nonprofit that offers free books and education to inmates, says the fee structure is exploitative.

“If you pause to think or reflect, that will cost you,” says Katy Ryan, the group’s founder and educational coordinator. “If you want to reread a book, you will pay the entire cost again. This is about generating revenue for the state and profit for the industry. Tablets under non-predatory terms could be a very good thing inside prisons. GTL does not provide that.” 

According to the contract, using the tablets will cost $0.05 per minute (currently discounted to $0.03) to read books, listen to music, or play games; $0.25 per minute for video visitations; $0.25 per written message; and $0.50 to send a photo with a message.

The Prison Policy Initiative estimated in 2017 that wages in West Virginia prisons range between $0.04 and $0.58 an hour.

According to the contract, the WVDCR will also receive a 5 percent commission on gross revenue from the tablets.

In a statement to Reason, a WVDCR spokesperson noted that no inmates are being forced to use the tablets. In addition, the 5 percent commission will go toward a fund at each prison that inmates “use for such things as paying for cable TV and hosting open house visitation events for families.” And the agency is not restricting purchases or donations of regular print books.

That last item is important, and hopefully it will remain true. There’s been a troubling trend in other parts of the country of prisons restricting book donations and forcing inmates to purchase books through pre-approved vendors or to use electronic tablets provided by private contractors like GTL and JPay.

Earlier this year, Book Riot reported that numerous Ohio prisons were banning book donations by groups like Appalachian Prison Book Project. Amid media scrutiny, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRC) announced it would lift the bans for third-party book donations. But family members are still banned from sending print material. In at least one Ohio prison, family members must put money into the inmate’s account so they can order it themselves. JPay, which handles money transfers for the Ohio prison system, takes a cut on all deposits. The director of the ODRC is the former general manager of JPay.

Pennsylvania, Washington, and three prisons in New York all attempted similar bans on donations of used books to inmates, then relented under citizen pressure. The prisons cited security concerns over contraband, but news investigations showed there was little actual evidence of smuggling via donated dictionaries.

Last year, after Florida inked a new contract with JPay to provide multimedia tablets to inmates, inmates were forced to return MP3 players they had purchased through the state’s previous provider, losing all the tracks they had purchased as well.

Pennsylvania also pays a private contractor $4 million a year for digitized mail services, where letters to inmates are scanned and sent to inmates as black and white photocopies while the original letters are destroyed.

In 2017, the WVDCR instituted a policy barring inmates from receiving original mail.

Although the books on Project Gutenberg are all free, there is little the organization can do to stop GTL and the WVDCR from charging for access to the tablets.

“It’s all very sad,” Greg Newby, CEO of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, wrote in an email to the Appalachian Prison Book Project. “From the trademark license of Project Gutenberg eBooks, I don’t see leverage to do anything about it. I’m glad that prisoners seem to have less expensive access to PG eBooks than to other content, but would greatly prefer if it was all free (and other reforms to the exploitation of prisoners).”

GTL did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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