Texas drunk drivers will now have to pay child support if they kill a parent, guardian

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

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

you know what prevents drunk driving? proper public transit

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.

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?

Fuck drunk drivers

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

I'm theory I like this idea, make the person that killed the parent and remove that support try to replace it. I just don't know how well it's going to work in practice. Like, I don't know how many drunk drivers have a high enough income that any meaningful amount of child support would be derived from this. Not that a drunk driver being poor or not should get them out of consequences. But like my dad weaseled his child support payments down to $25 a month and it was just ridiculous. It didn't help at all. But some nice karma on him was that all those years of working under the table to lower his child support meant that when the piece of shit got injured and needed to try to get disability he hadn't gotten enough work credits in the previous ten years.

I feel like it would probably be better if the state established a fund that they could use to pay out to those kids that they could fund at least partially with fines brought against drivers convicted of DUI. That way we could guarantee some level of support for the kids that lost parents and still force the drunk drivers to at least partially fund it but a kid won't get screwed just because the drunk driver that killed their parent particularly happened to be poor.

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.

Wow good job Texas! What if they never graduate high school though 😂

Alright this will sound controversial af, wouldn't that make it easier to choose if there is a scenario where the driver is about to hit a child and its parent, has the ability to swerve and avoid one of them, and choosing the child to avoid paying child support?

This'll never stand. What'll be next? The price for dui is already too high and the person likely to do this won't have the money to facilitate it anyway or even further financially ruining people. We may not like druck drivers but this is too much. If the State wants to help victims of drunk drives, then get a fund going that will help them. More punishment is not the answer

The majority of posts here say this is a bad law and appear to be more sympathetic to the drink driver than the victim. I suspect because the law makers are on the incorrect team

Next we can bring back blood money. If you're wealthy, avoid that inconvenient jail time by writing a check! We can make murder another one of those crimes for everyone but the rich.

Bravo Texas! Colour me surprised.