Texas justice has bad case of ‘affluenza’
A young Texas man drives into a crowd, killing four people, while driving under the influence late one night.
Depending on which headlines you read, this could be one of two stories. The first, the story of 16-year-old “affluenza” sufferer Ethan Couch, who is now 18 and currently sitting in a jail cell in Mexico after breaking the terms of his Tarrant County probation for killing four people and injuring nine others in a drunken-driving crash in 2013. Unless he is charged with additional crimes, the penalty for breaking probation will likely be — at most — four months in jail.
The second case is that of Rashad Owens, the 21-year-old musician who plowed into an Austin crowd during South by Southwest in 2014, killing four and injuring dozens. His penalty? Charged and convicted of capital murder last fall, he was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
The cases are a stark display of the extremes that can occur when justice goes awry under the influence of wealth and privilege — or the lack thereof.
Couch’s defense at the time of his trial? That his rich parents had used money to cure his problems rather than old-fashioned parenting and boundary-setting. Why should he be punished for his parents’ terrible decisions? Except for the fact that the same judge, Jean Boyd, had no problem holding another “poorer” drunken driver accountable, sentencing him to 20 years in a state lockup nine years earlier.
Couch was 16 years old at the time of his trial. And yes, age does make a difference. But Couch had also had a previous run-in with the law involving alcohol, and was caught with beer stolen from Wal-Mart and drugs in his system. Prosecutors in his case recommended the maximum sentence of 20 years after failing to move the case to the adult system.
Instead, Boyd, now retired, sentenced Couch to 10 years of probation and ordered him to undergo intensive therapy at a long-term facility. She bet that parents who had failed to hold Couch accountable the first 16 years of his life would suddenly get on the ball and do the hard work of family therapy and make sure Couch made his probation hearings. Boyd bet wrong: Couch’s mother is now facing charges for abetting his getaway to Puerto Vallarta — and his father was arrested in 2014 on charges of impersonating an officer.
Owens, on the other hand, also had a misdemeanor criminal background. At 21 years old, he was a father of six and working at Little Caesar’s Pizza in Killeen. He was in Austin playing a gig with his brother and was an aspiring music producer. He crashed through street barricades and into the SXSW crowds while fleeing a traffic stop. The police camera showed him weeping and fearful after the accident.
In the video he can be seen wailing: “Sir, all I care about is me not killing nobody,” he cried at one point from the back of a police cruiser. “I didn’t mean to hurt nobody. I was just scared.”
Should Owens be in jail? Absolutely. Would he have received even the possibility of parole if he had been wealthy and white with Travis County connections? Probably.
No one can say for sure that Couch’s wealth is the single factor that earned him 10 years of probation. It is also true that the distance between age 16 and 21 is a lifetime.
But ask yourself: Would Ethan Couch been free to play beer pong and run up a bar tab in Mexico last month if he had been a fast-food employee and black man with six small kids? Not a chance — even if his defense hadn’t said out loud that their client was too rich to be held accountable.