17 April 2016

Justice, finally

Slate has an article by Rachel E. Gross about a bad kid getting what he deserved:


When he was sixteen, Ethan Couch (photo) stole some beer with his friends, drove his pickup truck, and crashed into four people on the side of the road, killing them. He also severely injured one of the passengers in his vehicle. In court, a psychologist used the defense that Couch suffered from affluenza, a claim that he was morally challenged due to the wealth and permissiveness of his parents, and should therefore not be sent to jail. In 2013, he was sentenced to ten years probation, with no jail time.
Yeah, no jail time for killing four people. Couch got off easy, after being tried in juvenile court, which stresses rehabilitation, despite Tarrant County, Texas prosecutors having called for him to get twenty years in prison. The much, much, much lighter sentence only came after the affluenza defense nonsense. Needless to say, people (especially the family members of Couch’s victims) were pissed. “Being rich is now a get-out-of-jail-free card,” read a headline on The Week.
Those angered by his lenient sentencing can now be somewhat mollified: Couch was recently sentenced to nearly two years in jail after violating his probation, reports The New York Times. A judge ruled that he would spend 720 days at tjhe Tarrant County Jail in Fort Worth, Texas, 180 days for each count of intoxicated manslaughter. In December of 2015, Couch violated probation by fleeing with his mother to a Mexican resort town to avoid a probation hearing that might have led to jail time. Arrested by Mexican authorities, he was put in juvenile prison in Texas while awaiting a hearing.
In February of 2016, Couch was moved to adult jail, where he is currently in solitary confinement. “Prosecutors did not pursue a specific penalty in juvenile court for a probation violation because Couch would have aged out of the system once he turned nineteen,” according to The Times  “Instead, Couch’s case was moved to adult court, which led to Wednesday’s hearing.”
There’s still a possibility that the defense might be able to soften his sentence if they can make a convincing argument in the next two weeks, with the judge saying that “nothing I do is set in stone, so I might reconsider”. That seems impossible to imagine, but so did the idea that the affluenza defense would have worked in the first place.
Rico says that affluenza will not be a defense against some well-deserved sodomy while he's in prison...

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