News

Damn Texas. Sometimes you do manage to do something right.

Really, shouldn’t this apply to all manslaughter and murder cases?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Or until the child graduates from high school, "whichever is later."

So don't graduate and get paid for life?

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’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.

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.

This, unfortunately, makes hit and run the most viable strategy in Texas.

I mean sure, but they still should go for a long time to jail.

How about just make financial penalties for traffic violation/vehicular homicide be based upon salary/net worth like Europe?

will it turn into a chinese model where the driver is now looking to run over the kids too?

makes sense lmao drunk drivers are evil

Punitive damages for killing a person have to be a hell of lot more than paying the cost of child support.