Another judge, another enabler. 16-year-old Ethan Couch kills for, needlessly. And they still enable.
Tarrant County, Texas District Judge Jean Boyd, who sentenced 16-year-old Ethan Couch to 10 years of probation, with a mandatory stint at a long-term “treatment” center, for striking and killing youth pastor Brian Jennings and three others, who were helping to change a flat tire in Burleson, TX. Couch had been driving his dad’s F-350 with seven passengers and had just stolen some beer at a Wal-Mart. Nine others were injured, including two of his passengers, one of whom suffered a severe brain injury and is no longer able to move or talk.
The victims’ families were understandably irate at the sentence, noting that the judge seems to have bought the defense’s case that Couch, whose blood alcohol content was .24 per cent (which would require about 11 shots of 80-proof liquor—the equivalent of nearly two bottles of wine—over four hours for a 140-pound person), fell victim to “affluenza,” described by a defense psychologist as “being unable to link his bad behavior with consequences due to his parents teaching him that wealth buys privilege” and “growing up in a house where the parents were preoccupied with arguments that led to a divorce.”
Couch couldn’t link bad behavior to consequences because his parents and the law didn’t mete out consequences severe enough to get his attention. His parents let him drive at age 13 and let him “slide” on a ticket for being found at age 15 in a parked pickup with a passed-out, undressed 14-year-old girl. And why did his parents fail to inflict consequences and why were they so “preoccupied”? Because they are likely alcoholics, too. Ethan’s father was previously charged with criminal mischief, theft by check and assault, but charges were dropped; Ethan’s mother was convicted of reckless driving, costing her $500 and six months of “community supervision.” If the parents are alcoholics, of course they were preoccupied—they have a love affair with a drug, which takes precedence over everything else. Unfortunately, the odds are high that Ethan’s parents passed their alcoholic genes to their son.
Assistant district attorney Richard Alpert predicted future tragedy in his closing arguments: “There can be no doubt that he will be in another courthouse one day blaming the lenient treatment he received here.” If previous judges had meted out appropriate sanctions to the parents for their indiscretions, this tragedy might never have occurred. Society had already earned the right to put an ankle bracelet on Ethan and to subject him to regular and random other-drug testing; if it had done so, four deaths and nine injuries would never have occurred.