Damn Texas. Sometimes you do manage to do something right.
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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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?
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Two things in a row it seems. This is weird.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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'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".
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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!
Fuck drunk drivers
Punitive damages for killing a person have to be a hell of lot more than paying the cost of child support.
Actually one of the few sane things that Texas has done.
makes sense lmao drunk drivers are evil
will it turn into a chinese model where the driver is now looking to run over the kids too?
Damn. You found the loophole.
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Good move by Texas.
Wow good job Texas! What if they never graduate high school though 😂
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