Ethan Couch: Texas quadruple murderer – or a victim of ‘affluenza’?
Found on The Independent on Saturday, 14 December 2013
A wealthy Texan teenager who mowed down and killed four pedestrians while driving drunk has been sentenced to 10 years’ probation at a private rehab centre, rather than 20 years in jail as prosecutors had demanded.
Critics of the lenient sentence are outraged not so much by the sentence itself, as by the defence’s apparently successful argument that 16-year-old Ethan Couch was a victim of “affluenza” – meaning his family is so wealthy, and he so entitled, that he believed his actions would have no consequences.
Drunk driving, four dead, one paralyzed and two seriously injured. That's ok, because he has rich parents and has not been raised properly by them. Seriously, is there any better way to show the differences between being poor and rich?