A new law in Texas requires convicted drunk drivers to pay child support if they kill a child’s parent or guardian, according to House Bill 393.
The law, which went into effect Friday, says those convicted of intoxication manslaughter must pay restitution. The offender will be expected to make those payments until the child is 18 or until the child graduates from high school, “whichever is later,” the legislation says.
Intoxication manslaughter is defined by state law as a person operating “a motor vehicle in a public place, operates an aircraft, a watercraft, or an amusement ride, or assembles a mobile amusement ride; and is intoxicated and by reason of that intoxication causes the death of another by accident or mistake.”
Damn Texas. Sometimes you do manage to do something right.
This just seems like theater. What if you disable the parents such that they can’t support their kid? You slip through?
It’s theater. People go to prison for intoxication manslaughter. How are they making money to pay for child support? What kind of job will they really get after getting out of prison for essentially murder?
A cynical person might even say this is an attempt by the state and insurance companies to justify not having any sort of security net for victims’ families. If one person can be held financially responsible for the kids, why should anyone else have to step in?
That is exactly what it is, aimed at drunk drivers first because everyone will be on board with that demographic first. Then it will be expanded over time.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all. – H.L. Mencken
How are they making money to pay for child support?
Doesn’t matter. Seize their assets and auction them off. Use the proceeds to fund the reparations.
It’s not that difficult to think of solutions if you, you know, want to.
Ahh, yes. Assets. The thing most Americans have of course. /s
So… even if they have assets we shouldn’t seize them because… what?
Some people might not?
So, if they have a family and kids, I guess they’re on the street now? The parent involved is likely going to prison, so they’re not going to be able to provide support. This is “tough on crime” theater that would likely do nothing but cause more harm.
What do you mean? Do you expect the kids to just take care of themselves while their caretaker is in prison?
Lol. Come on man. Use your brain.
Also, why just drunk driving? Why not you pay child support for murder?
Because if you get convicted of murder, you go to jail for a long period of time and never really make much money again, even if you get out.
Their child support payments would be like 16.53 per month.
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Touché. Maybe to bring it back into the realms of ‘worth keeping’, it could be means-tested (so of you have assets then this stands and you gotta liquefy that wealth, but if you’re essentially unable to pay its recognized as a barrier to rehabilitation?)
I’m being incredibly naive here, I know…
Then they pay it.
Doesn’t matter. Seize their assets and auction them off. Use the proceeds to fund the reparations.
Person has a bad day after losing their job or some other real life event like losing their mother. Accidentally runs a red light and kills someone. Officer says they were drunk. Breathilizer says 0.0 and person says they were sober. Poof. They go to prison, and you are now asking someone to go to their house, sieze all their assets and throw their children and spouse out into homelessness because of an accident that involved one of the MANY incidents that occur where people get charged with DUI/DWI without being intoxicated.
I think you’re manufacturing fantastical situations because you want to agree with the crowd.
Gonna block you now. That was a bunch of gibberish.
Go live in your manufactured world that cops are dealing out fair and unbias judgement against citizens. If you need me to show you where it says they are allowed to give you a dui without you failing a breathilizer/ blood test I can
Murder is not near the problem of driving. Few people murder, but many have accidents.
Moving from A to B can still be a good thing to do, even if there are some remaining problems at B.
Better something than nothing, we can improve on something
You’re completely right. People just want to keep their blinders on and hate on this because it’s Texas. They don’t want to think critically and acknowledge a state that often does the wrong thing can also do the right thing.
I guarantee there wouldn’t be as many critical comments if this were New York or California.
I fucking hate Texas and I came here to support this move. (Most) People are less shitty than you suggest.
Yeah, you’re right. It’s just disheartening how many people view this as a bad thing even though it’s clearly a step in the right direction.
I’m sure the people that are against this are much more likely to voice their opinions than those that support it.
1,000%
In your metaphor b is closer to c than a so it’s a good thing. But if b is on a one way street to a cliff it doesn’t make it a good thing to drive there.
If someone is unable to pay the restitution because they’re incarcerated, they’re expected to make payments no “later than the first anniversary of the date,” of their release, the law says.
From the article. So seems like they thought of that too
So how long do you get for manslaughter in the us? 8 years? So at best the child gets support like 9 years later and only if the person manages to get a good enough job… Maybe the life of a child shouldn’t be a lottery but just backed by the state
So you’re saying that people can just ignore debt imposed and tracked by the government?
Two things in a row it seems. This is weird.
Seems like they have come along way since the grousing about the laws in the 80s coming into effect to ban a hard working person from enjoying a couple on the way home from work…
https://youtube.com/shorts/BVk-_xhccK4?si=aMU_vedYJAYnKg0y
Mix this in with the freeway speed limits are 80MPH on the highway in. Texas and often 65 for work zones on the smaller 2 lane highways. One can’t even go that fast on the I5 in Oregon with the Max being only 60 mph without construction delays. Can’t imagine adding a couple of drinks into the mix on the way home from a 12 hour day…
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They did something that wasn’t evil, just stupid. I guess that is a win for texas. There are already systems to make people pay damages to other people without having the child go trough the indignity of getting child support from a murderer.
Indignity of receiving child support? Are you kidding?
We’re talking about a child/children’s parent being killed, and you think it’s somehow unjust that they’re receiving the smallest amount of financial restitution from the person who killed them. I’d love to hear you explain how this is somehow stupid or insulting to a single parent and the surviving children.
All the words in my comment are important and you seem to have cut out a large part of them like some kind of weird ransome note.
I said that damages, that means the same as financial restitution, should be and is payed out in these kinds of cases. There is already a legal framework for that and it doesn’t involve child support like the drunk driver is the kids new dad. It is a gross way of looking at it and if it is truly child support like child support is handled then they have suddenly introduced a criminal aspect to a system that doesn’t normally interface with the justice system.
I am not going to oppose anything that gets more support to single parents and children who lose a parent.
Being opposed to this because of what it’s called is a ridiculously short sighted view to take. I don’t care what this is called, but it is not gross, and it is not stupid.
Do you actually read my comments or do you just skim them?
It’s a disease related to America Bad Syndrome, called “Texas Bad Syndrome”
To the afflicted, nothing Texas does is good.
Bro, it’s a habit that was instilled in us by Texas literally always doing the bad thing.
I’d have trouble believing I saw a unicorn if it ran by me too.
No no. They did a good thing. They just did it in a retarded way.
Really, shouldn’t this apply to all manslaughter and murder cases?
Totally. But the US is obsessed with punishment rather than reparations.
And rehabilitation
More like obsessed with superficiality
it’s all theatre, take something people love (children, mothers) & something people hate (criminals), now they can justify passing any legislation & continue expanding their control over time without fixing the underlying issues like lack of public transportation. but hey, guns are legal…FOR THE CHILDREN!
Should, yes. Does it already exist, yes. It can just be time consuming. Kill one parent surviving parent or guardian or state placed guardian is then supposed to go to civil court and a judge will rule the person pays support. Some would say that is costly but the court fees will end up having to be paid by the person the judge rules against. (Which many attorneys will pick up pro bono because no judge is going to rule that killing a parent(s) didnt cause at LEAST financial/ impact on the child/family.
The real headline here is Texas being in the news for something that isn’t shitty.
It’s new law day here in Texas. Typically because of the weird way our state works, laws passed in the once every other year legislature only becomes effective on September 1st of that year.
So good stuff like this, the tampon tax thing, etc yes it’s all good headline news.
But the vile, anti queer, christostate nonsense goes live now too.
Punishing drunk drivers is well-deserved, but as long as car-dependent infrastructure encourages drunk driving, it is considerably more difficult to actually decrease the rate of it. Taking a taxi is expensive and being a DD is no fun, so people take stupid risks. If you know you can take public transit home, there’s no reason to take such a risk at all.
This honestly reads like a defense of drunk driving, blaming the lack of infrastructure for bad decision.
Edit: or something very close to that.
But if you’re just saying we should design around stupid, then I guess I can agree there.
…as long as you totally ignore the opening statement
“No offense, but you’re fucking stupid.”
Like that kind of thing?
I mean, you said it.
lol
Explaining is not forgiving.
You have to design around stupid, because this is the real world. People can only expected to be rational sometimes, and in aggregate, you need systems that expect people to take whatever is the most obvious or easy choice available to them, whether it’s actually a good idea or not.
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Yeah yeah, public transit good, we know. STFU already. You fuckers are worse than vegans.
user name checks out
It needs to be addressed. Or people are gonna keep voting for pro-car politicians
Yeah. “One more lane” is something that a lot of people unironically think, it’s not just a meme, so trying to ensure that everybody knows how silly that is and how much harm it causes is one of the main ways that that line of thinking can be destroyed
This is just a debt trap. It won’t help any kids because the kids can’t get money from someone who is in prison, but it does make it harder for people who commit crimes to pay their debt and rejoin society. If the law specifically gave these support payments priority over fines payable to the state I’d feel differently, but the real point of this is to just pile debt on someone who can’t earn money.
This is what I was thinking as well. Or they are going to garnish the wage of prison pay so the child is only going to recieve very little.
Precisely. Nothing in Texas is supposed to work as advertised. This is to further hunt poor people. Ideally brown ones. Glad I left that rotten state.
Turning jail time into spending money looks a lot like fines being a cost of business. A CEO of a big company could just kill a child’s parents and not even feel the sting, as long as he’s drunk and his weapon is his car.
Bold of you to assume the CEO would be convicted
Or any rich kid:
testified in court that the teen was a product of “affluenza” and was unable to link his actions with consequences because of his parents teaching him that wealth buys privilege
He only killed 4 people while drunk driving 乁 ˘ o ˘ ㄏ
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Couch
He got a slap on the wrist with rehabilitation. He was only actually convicted for 2 years because he habitually broke his probation.
In Texas!
This is just an example, not really here to make outrage out of it, old news, but a typical example that money usually softens any blow.
Iirc most Texans were furious about that. As it turns out, his parents weren’t wrong, money does buy privilege! Sadly, Texas’ political system is so broken that even if every single person turned out to vote, the outcome likely wouldn’t change much.
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Fair
It doesn’t seem like this is instead of other punishments, it’s in addition. So this criticism doesn’t really make sense.
In many parts of the US, not sure about Texas, child support is based on the parent(s)'(s) income/wealth. The same should apply here, but for the drunk driver’s income/wealth.
The spirit of the law would be to ensure that the change in the money available for the development of the child changes as little as possible after separation of the parents. Under that assumption, the killer would only have to provide as much as the victim would have if they had separated.
cars the best weapon
https://lemmy.world/post/1685223
Already a thing.
So now drunk drivers have an incentive to claim it was intentional, not accidental.
The overall idea here is excellent, but it is fundamentally nonsensical to only apply it to drunk drivers and not all killers.
I guess… but that’s a risky move in a state that’s pretty gung-ho with the death penalty. I think most would rather pay the child support than admit to second or first degree murder
You think first degree murder would be a better financial decision than manslaughter?
Agreed with your second sentence. Though I think the state should step in to help the kids in either instance. If they’re convicted and are in prison it’s trying to get blood from a stone at that point.
This is Texas though. This isn’t about helping anyone it’s just grandstanding for votes.
For some people, prison could be a better alternative to becoming homeless due to an even smaller paycheck. I don’t think the idea of it is as outlandish as you think.
That reminds me of something that may not at all be true (please correct me if I’m wrong) I was told it, many years ago, by a person who lived for a few years in China.
She said that there was a law there (in the '90s at least) that if you injured someone accidentally to the point that they were disabled, you had to pay their disability as long as they lived (or you die, whichever is first). BUT if you accidentally killed someone (not murdered) then you just had to pay their family a fine.
The fine was much less than a lifetime of disability payments, so there was incentive, if you accidentally injured someone (especially a child with a lot of years to live) to just go all the way and kill them as long as it could feasibly look like an accident.
What I want to know is if they have to keep paying if the kids never graduate. It’s Texas so it seems like the odds are pretty high you could be paying for some dudes kids until they either get shot in a bar or do a lethal fentanyl hit.
Child support continues until the child is no longer a child (18).
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Someone might want to fix the summary. In bold it says 18 or when they graduate from high school *whichever is later *.
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Actually one of the few sane things that Texas has done.
Fuck drunk drivers
This is not a terrible law but maybe we should design our infrastructure such that injuries are rare rather than the “Accidents are common and you have to pay more if some of the people are alive after the accident” model we currently use.
It might be a terrible law if it pushes the burden of paying for a child’s care onto a person going to prison for a while, coming out in debt and without transportation, while being expected to pay for child support while also paying for their time in prison and having to find work as a felon instead of social security and welfare helping.
Aside from that it also makes no sense. Different punishments for killing different people shouldn’t be a thing. This will 100% be a law that makes sure criminals and felons stay felons and continue to go in for profit prisons while the government ducks out of paying welfare and social security. What a farce.
I don’t really care in this case, I mean if you chose to risk other people’s lives by drunk driving then who cares if it’s difficult to afford. I honestly think drunk driving is way too tolerated. Also it could also be tied to income, so you pay more if you have a higher income.
The only issue I can see with this, is if you have killed someone while drunk driving isn’t there going to be a good chance the kid will already have reached adulthood by the time the drunk driver is released? That and this does just seem like a way for the state to avoid financially supporting those families. So for those two reasons the law is flawed I would say
It’s not a punishment in this case, it’s a form of restitution to help provide financial security to families that have lost a caretaker/breadwinner.
Restitution is a financial punishment that follows the offender for years and often decades after the fact. Many times offenders on parole or probation are required to remain on probation until restitution is fully repaid, and while on probation/parole it’s extremely easy to have your probation/parole revoked (meaning you get sent straight back to prison, often on fresh charges), plus the requirements for the probation & parole can absolutely violate their rights because “it’s a privilege to be on probation/parole instead of prison”
This is all not mention the difficulty they have getting work after they leave the prison/jail with a felony conviction. There’s a reason so many ex-cons operate businesses, it’s because it’s often the most viable path to a living income
If you are having to pay out money to no benefit of your own you can try to spin it any way you want. It’s still a punishment.
these crashes are not “accidents” if infrastructure is designed that way. the design/engineering element make these crashes “features” of the design.
You’re wrong it’s a terrible law, it gets filed under creul and unusual
Or until the child graduates from high school, “whichever is later.”
So don’t graduate and get paid for life?
You aren’t too good at reading are you?
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Later implies that both must occur to be free of child support
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I’ll always be in favor of heavily penalizing drunk driving and improving enforcement to dissuade people from drunk driving.
That said, it would be nice if we could take a page out of the books of other countries where children and parents don’t have to rely on child support to ensure children get the means necessary to survive.
The current system furthers this game of hot potato which leads to children having a poor relationship with one of their parents and growing up in poverty, all in the name “personal responsibility” and “muh tax payer moneys” while children end up being collateral damage.
Correction, this is Texas, so you’ll have to pay if you’re poor or not right wing politically connected. If you can afford proper counsel, you won’t.
Don’t mess with Texas.
Texas is too busy messing with Texas for anyone else to fit in.
Serious question, how do they do that, while in prison with no residual income? And if they were already near broke, how does this work?
I would like for someone to try and get corporations to pay child support when one of their workers dies from neglectful maintenance or dangerous policies.
That doesn’t seem like a bad thing per se- but I do somewhat worry that this would simply lead to corporations refusing to hire parents, firing people who become parents (for “some other reason” if necessary), or at least preferentially hiring people deemed unlikely to have children.
Why do I get the feeling that corporations would excuse said selective hiring as “green?”
it probably won’t hurt in most cases. BUT if your parents get murdered by someone with money, you’re at least getting some kinda support.
Seize their assets and auction them off. Use the proceeds to fund the reparations.
And if their assets are basically worthless too?
Then yeah, there’s nothing to do besides garnish their wages after they get out (if they get out.)
Still, it’s something that they should do if they can.
So…if you actually want to have fewer drunk driving incidents…and fewer crashes in general, we know how. You have less car centric infrastructure. Of course youre gonna have drunk driving when bars have required minimum parking when being built.
Yeah this won’t stop a single accident - and it will probably not result in more money for the kids, too since many people won’t be able to pay from prison
But at least the government won’t have to drop a penny. Working as intended!
