It was shortly after 10pm on a hot June evening last summer when a bunch of teenagers from an affluent suburb of Fort Worth, Texas, stole two cases of beer from a Walmart supermarket. They had been drinking already and when an hour later 16-year-old Ethan Couch volunteered to run an errand to a late-night chemist some of them told him he was in no fit state. But when he insisted on it they all piled into his father’s red Ford truck, six in the cab and two in the open back.
The truck was accelerating at 70mph in a 40mph residential zone when it ploughed into two parked cars. Breanna Mitchell, a young chef on her way home from work, had stopped with a fl at tyre, and local resident Hollie Boyles and her twenty-something daughter Shelby had come out to help her. Brian Jennings, a youth pastor in his early 40s, had also stopped his car to lend a hand.
All four were thrown 60 yards and died instantly. Emergency staff called to the scene described seeing body parts all over the road. The speeding truck turned over and hit a tree. None of the joyriders were wearing seat belts and two were seriously injured, including Sergio Molina, 16, who was left unable to move, eat or talk as the result of a brain injury.
Meanwhile Jennings’s car, in which two of his children were waiting, was knocked into the path of a passing Volkswagen, one of whose occupants was also injured. Of the 12 survivors, only three did not require hospital treatment.
One of those was Couch. Belligerent with the police, he was so drunk that when he tried to walk away he got tangled in a wire fence. His blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit three hours after the crash and he was found to also have valium in his system.
Expressing no remorse, he pleaded guilty to four counts of manslaughter and might have expected a 20-year prison sentence. That’s what another 16-year-old drink driver, Eric Miller, received when he was up before the same judge a decade earlier – and he had a much lower blood alcohol level and had killed one victim not four.
But as a result of a judgment that has shocked America, Couch will not serve a day in prison. Instead he was given 10 years’ probation, during which time he can’t drink or drive, and was ordered to attend a £275,000-a-year rehab centre in California at his family’s expense, for an unspecified time.
Why? Because, according to a psychologist who testified in his defence, the teenager was a victim of “affluenza”. In other words he was so rich he didn’t know any better and couldn’t understand that his actions would have consequences. That the judge seemed to agree with this view has outraged his victims and caused a national furore across the United States.
“What is the likelihood if this was an African-American inner-city kid that grew up in a violent neighbourhood to a single mother who is addicted to crack and he was caught two or three times… what is the likelihood that the judge would excuse his behaviour and let him off because of how he was raised?” asks distinguished psychologist Professor Suniya Luthar.
Ethan’s father Fred Couch is a businessman who owns a sheet metal works with an annual turnover of £9million and around 30 staff. After a difficult divorce from Ethan’s mother Tonya, he reportedly gave his son the use of a mansion in the suburb of Burleson where he lived alone and ran wild.
A teenager invited there three nights before the fatal crash reported: “Ethan lived in this big place with a long winding driveway that went all the way round to his back yard, which had a large pool in it. When we arrived the first thing he did was jump in the pool with his clothes on, rip his shirt off then start downing a big bottle of vodka. He was really knocking it back. He must have drunk about six or seven shots in one go.
“That set the tone and from then on he was just boasting and trying to impress us about how much he drank and how much he partied. He also boasted about selling drugs and getting big amounts of marijuana delivered to his house. He kept saying that he lived in the place alone and could do whatever he wanted. At first I didn’t believe him but when we went inside there were empty liquor bottles everywhere and what looked like joint butts in the ashtrays.”
At the trial psychologist Dr Dick Miller testified that Couch had been brought up in a household so indulgent that boundaries had never been established for his behaviour, giving him “freedoms no young person should have”. He cited his parents’ decision not to punish him after he was found by police in a parked truck with an unconscious, undressed 14-year-old girl a year before the crash. He had also been allowed to drink from the age of 13.
One of his friends testified that Couch said his family “would get him out of anything”. Despite that boast, district judge Jean Boyd’s decision not to impose a custodial sentence – originally made in December and upheld last week after prosecutors asked her to reconsider – has left the victims aghast. “There needs to be some justice here,” said Eric Boyles, who lost his wife and daughter in the carnage. “For 25 weeks I’ve been going through a healing process. And so when the verdict came out, my immediate reaction is: I’m back to week one. We have accomplished nothing here.”
The suggestion that Couch was a victim of his family’s wealth may yet backfire on his parents. They are now facing multi-million-dollar legal claims by the victims and their families. Wendy Davis, Democratic candidate for governor of Texas, has called the sentence a “disgrace” and even Dr Miller says he regrets ever mentioning the word affluenza, which was coined by two Australian academics as the title of a 2005 book about the stress, depression and obesity associated with consumer life.
“I wish I had not used that term,” he says. “Everyone seems to have hooked on to it.”
He is right about that. In California, a member of the state assembly has introduced a bill that would ban trial lawyers from invoking the supposed condition as a defence or in mitigation for sentencing.
“It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that the relatively lenient sentence that this gentleman in Texas received will lead attorneys to see this as something to use in their overall tool box,” he says.
And before you think this is the kind of thing that could happen only in America, a pair of Scottish oil workers got away with community service orders last month after launching a drunken attack on a fellow customer in a bar in Aberdeen. Their defence was that they were suffering the effects of having too much money.
Meanwhile Ethan Couch has said nothing. Having been proved right in his pronouncement that his parents could get him out of anything, why should he need to say sorry?
Whenever a misadventure is encountered, the first response is mum! Nobody talks to anybody as anything you say will be used against you in any situation just to fry your goose. Silence is golden whilst the conniving officers of the law scheme out devious plans to dissociate yourself any plausible repercussions. Truth, justice, liberty you say? What is that? When you are persecuted and crucified for an event that even be beyond your control and your rice bowl is jeopardised, to hell with doing the right thing. It is the right thing alright, for yourself and your dependants. By admitting mistakes, everything would be pinned on you conveniently. In this world of fault seeking and destiny defying population, no one will empathise with you or have sympathy for your predicament. The time for Truth (a.k.a. God) to set things straight is long gone. We killed God long ago with our advancement in technology. There was a time when we were quite green about things around us. We had once marvelled at the splendour of many breathtaking events in our lives - how the sun was eaten by darkness; how the wrath the Mother Nature belched out boiling molten rocks whenever we thought we had wronged and how God punished the fornicators by inflicting incurable diseases!
