Ethan Couch
It descended upon the world as a perfect storm of hot takes. As soon as a hired gun expert witness testified that a wealthy white kid, Ethan Couch, couldn’t be held fully responsible for the drunken killing of four people because his affluence and privilege robbed him of the capacity to take full responsibility for his destructive actions — and the judge only sentenced him to probation — the media content engines spun up to overdrive.
And now Ethan Couch is out of jail — a sentence he didn’t receive for killing four people, but for skipping the country after video surfaced of him violating his probation with a game of beer pong — so get ready for some vintage takes!
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This story had everything the lowest common denominator of media consumption needed. Imagine a story that simultaneously embarrassed lawyers, psychologists, and millennials. That most of the jokes we told back then disingenuously latched onto this kid’s story to advance troubling agendas didn’t slow anyone down. Somehow swallowing this tripe of an excuse became a call for harsher punishment for juveniles, disregarding social sciences as mitigating factors, and fueling all manner of parenting angst.
Above the Law even got in on the action. Four years ago, Elie Mystal was really committed to figuring out how to blame the parents for Couch’s crimes, in the unironic apotheosis of the kid’s effort to abdicate all responsibility. That calls for “blaming the parents” for juvenile transgressions almost always metastasize into an excuse to jail minorities became a footnote to the story. Sadly, as NPR points out, one need look no further than Couch’s judge to see how courts feel about consistently applying the law:
By contrast, the same judge had nine years earlier sentenced another teen, whose mother was a drug user, to 20 years in jail for a drunken driving incident that left one man dead.
Well, Couch’s mom is in jail for failing drug and alcohol tests right now. That probably still wouldn’t make much difference. Her decision to address his beer pong violation by taking the international fugitive route certainly gave Elie’s earlier post a good deal more traction. Her drug and alcohol test failures constituted a violation of her bail while awaiting trial for money laundering and, you know, helping a fugitive skip the country.
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Why exactly do judges keep letting this family out of jail?
But Couch, now 20, is free:
He exited the courthouse Monday morning flanked by his legal team without making any statements to the press, and rode away in the back of a Tesla.
So does this mean that Couch, whose journey through the legal system began with drunken vehicular manslaughter has a Tesla? There’s no way we can have a breathless hot take about cars with autonomous driving capabilities, right?
Damn. Oh well.
‘Affluenza’ Driver Out On Probation After Nearly 2 Years In Jail [NPR]
Earlier: In Defense Of The Rich White Boy Who Killed Four People And Got Away With It
The Affluenza Kid And Privilege (This Time The Evidentiary Kind)
Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.