Affluenza* – A Rich Boy’s Plea

Ethan Couch

Now I’ve heard everything!  He did it because his family is too wealthy to teach him any better.

Sixteen-year-old Texan Ethan Couch killed four people last June when he crashed into them at 70 miles per hour, having a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit. 

The other car?  There was no other car.  These victims were merely standing beside the road along with the nine others who were injured in the tragedy.

Rather than vehicular homicide, the teen was charged with four counts of manslaughter, because the court decided Ethan Couch was “too wealthy to understand the difference between good and bad.” Although the prosecutors in the case were seeking a 20-year prison sentence, the maximum for the manslaughter charges, Couch was given only 10 years of probation.

Dr. G. Dick Miller, the psychologist hired by the defense, told the court that Ethan Couch’s life could be salvaged if he spent a year or two in treatment with no contact with his parents.  There have been reports that they plan to send the teen to a $500,000/year facility in California somewhere – probably in some God-awful place like Malibu Beach or Santa Barbara.  Poor thing.

Dr. Miller testified that Ethan’s parents gave him “freedoms no young person should have.”  He said the boy is a victim of “affluenza” because his family believed wealth bought privilege.  He said the parents did not believe there was any link between behavior and consequences.

All this time many of us have understood how poverty contributes to the illegal, irrational and violent behavior of some young people raised in America’s pockets of poverty.  Many a defense attorney has used that excuse in their pleas for leniency for kids even younger than Ethan who commit heinous crimes.  We’ve all known it is possible to be too poor to keep children fed, clothed, educated and supervised properly.

But to be too rich?  Too rich to teach a child not to drink and drive?  Too rich to at least PAY somebody to teach the kid about consequences of breaking the law? I don’t buy it. 

Juvenile Judge Jean Boyd of Fort Worth did buy it, apparently, because by the time Ethan Couch is 26, he will have satisfied his debt to society and have the opportunity to resume his life of privilege and exceptionalism. 

I knew the almighty dollar had the loudest voice in this country, but this is a new low.  Perhaps Ethan Couch’s parents should go to prison.

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*The book Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic defines it as "a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more".^[1]