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.
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.
Moving from A to B can still be a good thing to do, even if there are some remaining problems at B.
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.
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
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…
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.
It’s a disease related to America Bad Syndrome, called “Texas Bad Syndrome”
To the afflicted, nothing Texas does is good.
Really, shouldn’t this apply to all manslaughter and murder cases?
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!
Maybe. You would basically be created a two-tiered system of punishment. If you kill me you have to pay for my kids, if you kill someone childless you don’t pay.
I am not sure what the repercussions of that would be.
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.
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.
Much FEWER people driving drunk, though, which is the point. Just because the solution doesn’t take the problem from 100 to 0 doesn’t mean that taking it to 20 or whatever isn’t beneficial.
Also, “having some proper punishment won’t hurt you” is ridiculously wrong, based on the US having one of if not THE most punitive “justice” system and amongst the highest rates of crime of all western countries.
Prevention and restorative justice works MUCH better at decreasing crime than revenge-based punishment.
The highest incarceration and punishment rate in the world. If you went by the statistics, Americans are, “apparently,” 4.3 times more likely to be criminals than Chinese citizens, and it just gets worse from there, as every other country in the world has even fewer people incarcerated per 100,000 people.
Our punishment system is broken.
Or people could stop it at the source and be responsible. Probably too much too ask.
Source of what? Drunk driving? That would probably be the individual, who knowing that the only mode of transportation for the night is to drive themselves and still decided to drink and then drive. Is that specific enough for you or are you still struggling with the concept?
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.
Could take a Uber/Lyft.
I deal with this issue, the big bus station and my house are divided by a highway. So me and my buddies go out it either has to be very local or I have to take a rideshare for a five minute drive home.
the big bus station and my house are divided by a highway
Why does this have to be a thing? In my country they have bridges for pedestrians over the road, or underground passageway.
I live in a city where taking an Uber or Lyft a few miles is like $25, maybe $50 at the last call surge. Unfortunately ride-sharing is a lot more expensive in cities that don’t also have good transit, so I keep getting reminded that $25 is cheap for a ride share across any distance.
Back when I used to go out drinking, catching the last train home or taking an Uber was my go-to choice. I don’t drink much nowadays, but the rush home in an area without good transit infrastructure is still something I think about a lot.
People need to live within their means. It’s not a human right to go get drunk every weekend. If you can’t afford it, you stay home.
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.
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
I don’t drink, but I’ve known plenty of people that can have a potent margarita, hangout for an hour or two, and then hop on one foot or do a cartwheel just fine.
I have serious doubts those folks are any more of a danger to anyone than the average driver or the average tired or emotional driver.
I guess what I’m saying is… it’s idealistic to never be impaired and always be at 100% but there’s a tolerable amount of impairment where realistically it’s not going to have an impact, and I think the law takes that into account appropriately as is; so as to say driving after a drink is not the same thing as driving while drunk. It’s not the folks genuinely having one or two, it’s the folks that had “one or two” (12) barely made it to their car and then went down the road.
Yeah, people should have the right to choose to drink, and then choose to drive, and “accidentally” kill someone.
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.
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.
It needs to be addressed. Or people are gonna keep voting for pro-car politicians
