- cross-posted to:
- fuck_cars@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_cars@lemmy.ml
New law in Texas will make drunk drivers who murder parent or guardian to pay child support to the child of the deceased until the child is 18 years old.
New law in Texas will make drunk drivers who murder parent or guardian to pay child support to the child of the deceased until the child is 18 years old.
Um… Why is not this law in effect like everywhere? Like otherwise you just ruin a etire family and just like “ooooops, too bad”?
Because it disproportionately impacts the poor, likely doesn’t result in much actual support, AND can be used to justify lesser sentencing otherwise.
A poor person kills someone? They are beggared, the family doesn’t really get anything, and the world moves on.
A rich person kills someone? Well, they already are suffering enough so let’s just go with the child support. And then they likely stiff the bill anyway because their lawyers can argue that it isn’t even worth mailing the pocket change every month.
Weregilds have historically been how the rich get away with murder and how the poor are turned into slaves.
I think I have two question about this:
First, in this hyper capitalistic society, isn’t everything bad for the poor, from the legal system to democracy itself. For example you can argue the poor lacks the time and resource to properly understand the policy, hence more likely to be misled by the candidate.
And in this specific cases, the public can pay for it if the person is poor enough, like declaring bankrupt. I am not so familiar with the procedure and loopholes related to bankrupt, so feel free to educate me on that.
On the other hand, I don’t think rich people should be able to get away from jail time simply because they have paid money. Unfortunately this is seen through out our legal system. So I am definitely not supporting that. But I imagine the law can be easily changed to add the child care/medicare cost to the existing manslaughter sentence, instead of replacing the manslaughter sentence?
Mostly you are just pointing out the systemic issues of late stage capitalism.
But as for sentencing: judges have an insane amount of power in that regard. And they are often biased shitbags who will do everything in their power to be lenient to “pillars of the community”. So if you give them a meaningless punishment, they’ll immediately use that and then talk about how it is important to rehabilitate rich white people and that excessive punishment is not the law.
I honestly don’t care if a poor person is worse than “beggared” by the sentence.
Thing is, the rich person should be, too. Make it scale based on available resources.
I think around 90% of all available money on the poor end to 99.999% on the rich end is fair. Or I’m the case of Bezos-level richies, leave them with about $5 a year to live on.
This mistake should essentially completely ruin the drunk’s entire life permanently. No reason to spare them any misery. There’s no other way to make it a law not worth breaking into you make it absolutely impossible to live with doing it.
There are issues to work on about who receives the money to prevent further problems, but it’s a start.
Yup. That should be everywhere. It shouldn’t be just kids either. If you disable someone you should be paying similar support for the rest of your life.