Michelle Carter led in chains to parole hearing

The Massachusetts woman who encouraged her suicidal boyfriend to kill himself in a series of heartless text messages — and who now wants out of jail early — was led into a parole hearing Thursday wearing handcuffs and ankle shackles.

Michelle Carter, 22,  has served seven months of her 15-month manslaughter sentence. She appeared before officials on Thursday morning to ask for early release.

For now, though, she remains very much in custody.

Aerial video posted by NBC in Boston shows her walking with difficulty as two law enforcement officers lead her out of a Bristol County sheriff’s van, across a short expanse of parking lot and into a back entrance of the parole board’s headquarters in Natick, Mass.

Carter arrived at 9 a.m. for the closed-to-the-press hearing, and was escorted out of the building for her ride back to jail at 11:30 a.m.

The family of her victim, Conrad Roy III, 18, also attended the hearing but did not speak to the press.

Decisions on parole applications are usually made within a couple of days, according to parole spokesman Jake Wark.

“The Parole Board will consider the facts and testimony and reach a decision, usually within 48 hours,” Wark said.

“Naturally, that decision will go to the inmate and victim’s family first.”

Carter meanwhile is petitioning the US Supreme Court in hopes of getting her conviction overturned on First Amendment grounds.

She had claimed at trial that her texts were protected “free speech,” a theory that was rejected during her 2017 bench trial.

Carter recklessly caused her teen pal’s 2014 suicide death by badgering him with cruel texts, the judge found.

One text read, “get back in,” and was sent by Carter after Roy had second thoughts and got out of his Ford truck, which was running and filling with carbon monoxide in a Kmart parking lot in Fairhaven.

Roy did get back in the truck — and died inside.

“After she convinced him to get back into the carbon monoxide-filled truck, she did absolutely nothing to help him,”  Justice Scott Kafker wrote in rejecting her first appeal in February.

“She did not call for help or tell him to get out of the truck as she listened to him choke and die,” Kafker wrote.