Damn Texas. Sometimes you do manage to do something right.
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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?
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?
That is exactly what it is, aimed at drunk drivers first because everyone will be on board with that demographic first. Then it will be expanded over time.
Also, why just drunk driving? Why not you pay child support for murder?
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.
Really, shouldn’t this apply to all manslaughter and murder cases?
Totally. But the US is obsessed with punishment rather than reparations.
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.
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.
nah, cyclist here. people "walk" on vehicular manslaughter all the time. it's super fucked up. commonly a suspended sentence is issued.
This creates an incentive to let high earners:wealthy people :off the hook for jail time since they will have to earn money to pay for the support. This of course won’t apply to lower earners which will go to 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.
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.
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?
Just know, all humans are terrible drivers (myself included). A drunk driver is like putting a toddler being the wheel.
We need better public transit. Period. Get cars out of human hands.
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.
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 would like for someone to try and get corporations to pay child support when one of their workers dies from neglectful maintenance or dangerous policies.
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.
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