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?
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.
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…
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.
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.
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?
you know what prevents drunk driving? proper public transit
From a country with proper public transport here (Norway): people still drive drunk with that, so having some proper punishment won’t hurt you.
There’s also shootings in Norway. The key difference is frequency
The real headline here is Texas being in the news for something that isn’t shitty.
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.
If only there was something to do besides getting drunk. Or if only there was a way to stop drinking before you get hammered.
Car dependent infrastructure has very little to do with people making bad decisions. Getting drunk shouldn’t be a given.
Drinking is a personal choice.
Yes, I agree people are allowed to do absolutely idiotic things without consequences.
Drinking is a personal choice. Getting drunk affects more than yourself.
People can enjoy a drink responsibly, but you shouldn’t drive even if you’ve only had a couple of drinks. Even a small amount of impairment is unacceptable when you’re controlling a machine that could easily kill other people by mistake.
I’d argue anyone drinking and getting behind the wheel is making a conscious enough decision to make it murder. And I hope that more cases end up going that route of prosecution
A little philosophical, but the drunk person who decides to drive is a different person than the sober person who decided to drink in the first place. Punishing the sober person for the decisions made by the drunk version of themselves is maybe misguided, except for as a deterrent that says “don’t turn into a drunk person that can make stupid decisions”
I’m not sure what the right answer is to this problem. Just some food for thought
That’s just about the least convincing take I’ve ever heard. You can absolutely punish the person who made the decision to impair themselves beyond the ability to make rational decisions. They came from the same decision to get drunk by the sober person. A person who has a propensity to get drunk and drive is a danger to everyone and needs to be dealt with accordingly.
I think you missed my point. My point is that the crime the sober person makes is deciding to become impaired. That’s different from saying the sober person made a decision to drive drunk - the drunk person made that decision, not the sober person. There are 2 different people here in this scenario. Whether the law should treat it that way is a separate discussion. It would have some similarities with a “temporary insanity” defense.
I did not miss your point. I thought it was entirely unconvincing. The other person is the same person just with the disadvantage of being fucked up.
Edit. Furthermore, I believe that the drunk self is just an amplified version of the sober self. My theory is that if your drunk self is capable of doing bad, so is your sober self.
This honestly reads like a defense of drunk driving, blaming the lack of infrastructure for bad decision.
…as long as you totally ignore the opening statement
Anything said before the word ‘but’ can be ignored in these instances.
“No offense, but you’re fucking stupid.”
Like that kind of thing?
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.
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
I wonder how this will work in practice since most of the time if you kill someone under the influence your life is basically over. Not exactly going to be able to pay a percent of your earnings while you are in jail.
I have an aunt with six DUIs. After the second, they all become felonies, which are supposed to be 2 years at least in jail. I don’t think she’s ever spent more than a day in jail. Intoxication manslaughter may be worse, but the courts treat alcohol related incidents with kid gloves a LOT of the time.
My brother spent 3 seperate days in jail for 5 drunk driving charges.
I mean he’s my brother, but lock that idiot up for a while longer, at least.
nah, cyclist here. people “walk” on vehicular manslaughter all the time. it’s super fucked up. commonly a suspended sentence is issued.
Vehicular manslaughter !== Killing someone by drunk driving. Drunk driving is clear negligence, hitting someone entirely on accident shouldn’t ruin two lives. In those articles it doesn’t say anything about the driver being drunk
criminal negligence causing death is manslaughter.
This guy was on drugs and frustrated because a “slow driver” ahead of him
It’s a combination of negligence and vehicular manslaughter.
hitting someone entirely on accident shouldn’t ruin two lives.
Why? Was the victim entirely innocent? Did it result in permanent injury or death of the victim(s)? Would it have been less dangerous if the one who produced the accident did not drive a car? Was the driver incapacitated by alcohol/drugs/anything else? If the answer to ANY of those is “yes”, then it should very fucking well ruin two lives. And if the driver had a license, the entire system that granted them the responsibility of handling a few tons of metal should be considered accomplices until they can fucking prove otherwise.
Or at least have the decency to let the victim’s family decide, don’t take it upon yourself to just casually forgive a mistake if it had no impact on you.
So if a person runs and appears out of nowhere in front of a moving car and it results in them being hit, the driver’s life should be ruined? It’s called accident for a reason, nobody wanted it.
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.
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.
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).
deleted by creator
Someone might want to fix the summary. In bold it says 18 or when they graduate from high school *whichever is later *.
deleted by creator
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.
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
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
How about just make financial penalties for traffic violation/vehicular homicide be based upon salary/net worth like Europe?
See that is the opposite of the goal here. This will be a whip on poor people. Making the fine tied to your income would punish the people writing this bill they cannot have that !
This is where it needs to start.
I mean sure, but they still should go for a long time to jail.
I don’t know, being in jail means they won’t be able to pay for the child support.
I’d say the better option is a driving ban, with a hars punishment if broken. Making them live on the verge of poverty is IMO better as a punishment and it’s better for the child / society in general
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!
I’m theory I like this idea, make the person that killed the parent and remove that support try to replace it. I just don’t know how well it’s going to work in practice. Like, I don’t know how many drunk drivers have a high enough income that any meaningful amount of child support would be derived from this. Not that a drunk driver being poor or not should get them out of consequences. But like my dad weaseled his child support payments down to $25 a month and it was just ridiculous. It didn’t help at all. But some nice karma on him was that all those years of working under the table to lower his child support meant that when the piece of shit got injured and needed to try to get disability he hadn’t gotten enough work credits in the previous ten years.
I feel like it would probably be better if the state established a fund that they could use to pay out to those kids that they could fund at least partially with fines brought against drivers convicted of DUI. That way we could guarantee some level of support for the kids that lost parents and still force the drunk drivers to at least partially fund it but a kid won’t get screwed just because the drunk driver that killed their parent particularly happened to be poor.
I suspect it will just end in a lot of “Well, the guy that killed your dad was poor, so you’re not getting any child support”.
Not to mention…. Manslaughter. Vehicular homicide with a dui modifier. Not sure about Texas but some places that becomes a felony.
So most duis that lead to the death of someone else…. Are absolutely going to jail.
Which is very much not conducive to paying child support.
Fuck drunk drivers
Actually one of the few sane things that Texas has done.
Punitive damages for killing a person have to be a hell of lot more than paying the cost of child support.
