'Affluenza' kills: White teen's light sentence exposes dark side of criminal justice system

In January 1997, a 13-year-old black boy allegedly walked up to a man and shot him with rifle. Labeled a cold-blooded thug, Michael Lewis stood less than 5 feet tall when a judge handed down a life sentence in a Georgia courtroom.

Last week, convicted on multiple counts of manslaughter and assault, 16-year-old Ethan Couch walked out of a Texas courtroom and into the public spotlight. Unlike Michael, Ethan will not spend a day behind bars. Despite killing four innocent people and shattering the lives of countless others, he was given ten years probation and ordered into a private rehabilitation center at his parents’ expense.

Many believe, as I do, that the difference in sentencing demonstrates how irreparably flawed justice can be in this country.  Although their cases differ in a myriad of ways, all too often race and wealth dictate how much justice one can expect. For Ethan, justice it seems is as warm and comforting as that summer in night in Fort Worth. So unlike the relentlessly cold justice Michael encountered on a wintry night in Atlanta.

Both young boys: One white, one black. One rich, the other poor.

Fulton County district attorney Paul Howard, who had been just elected the first black district attorney in Georgia, decided to try Michael as an adult. “The age of criminal responsibility is 13,” prosecutors said of a then new Georgia law. “That’s what the legislature set for violent crimes.”

There was no psychiatric evaluation, no assessment to determine if the boy was competent to stand trial. His court-ordered public defender did not press for it, nor did the judge in the case find it necessary. Michael, known as “Little B,” had killed a hard-working father in front of his wife and children.

One look at his Atlanta public school records, where administrators admitted that he was enrolled for less than two years, would have revealed that Michael had an IQ well below average. His crack-addled mother “smoked up the water,” Michael would tell his defense attorneys. In fact, every dime of her welfare check went into the pipe.  Her three children, who never knew their fathers, subsisted in a roach-infested, lean-to house with no electricity, no running water or food. Michael, who was once placed in foster care, looked after his then-five-year-old sister Tavia under that failing roof. He got Ta-Ta dressed for school every day, where they ate free breakfast and lunch. His older brother was already a dope boy in-training.

Michael lived no other way, because frankly there was no one there to show him any other.

In time, J-Boy put his little brother to work. Together, they watched and bet on pit bull fights, smoked weed, and sold drugs. Young Michael was the “collector.” At 13, he frequented strip clubs and rode bikes with his young friends.  By the time he was 14, Michael was in a maximum-security adult facility.

Twenty-three-year-old Darrell Woods and his wife had gone to a convenience store for cold sodas that night; their two small children were in the backseat.  Bypassing a boulevard of other well-lit quick-marts and gas stations, they settled on one off the beaten path, one deep within “The Bluff,” one notorious for its open-air drug market.  Investigators were not in the least suspicious of their choice. At the time, no one questioned the story of an innocent stop for soft drinks.

Woods, according to prosecutors, was ordered by Michael to turn off his headlights — presumably to shield the spot from the prying eyes of law enforcement. Witnesses said that when Woods refused, Michael retrieved a gun from the side of the store, returned to the car and blew him away.

An informant fingered Michael for the brutal murder.

Deals were cut with known prison-evading drug-dealers and reward-collecting addicts, despite street talk that J-Boy and his friend Big E were behind the murder.  They believed, according to back fence talk, that they could hang the heinous crime on a hapless 13-year-old and he would get off with a little time in juvenile. “I saw that man that shot my daddy,” one of the Woods children said. The diminutive Michael, despite his troubled past, was anything but a man.

Questions about his guilt or innocence continue to haunt. But Michael had no one, no one with the financial wherewithal to step up to demand answers.

Evidence, including conflicting, now “lost” video taped statements, was suppressed. Blaring newspaper headlines fueled a mob-like, national hysteria and unchecked willingness to condemn black boys like Little B.  A columnist at The Atlanta Journal Constitution, who was my first editor, an early mentor and who is also black, made the unfortunate argument that the murder case was a “cautionary tale” of the catastrophic consequences the come with the breakdown of the black family. “Thirteen year olds [without fathers],” he said, “[are] out there gunning down real fathers— which the black community boasts so few of.”

AJC writer Elena Fernandez deemed Michael “an evil in our town.” He had, after all, made the first of 12 appearances in juvenile court for an assault charge when he was just ten years old. Woods, on the other hand, despite his own assault charges, was being heralded as a pillar of the community—a strong black father.  His wife, wracked with grief, miscarried their third child the same day Little B was arrested. Former Atlanta mayor Bill Campbell, father of a 13-year-old son of his own, chimed in with an additional $2,000 reward to compel more witnesses to come forward. A crack addict named Bertha, who was reportedly high when she testified, got the money. Woods had one working headlight but, under oath, Bertha said she was buying drugs in an empty lot across the street when she clearly saw Little B raise the rifle in the darkness.

Represented by incompetent counsel, raised by a ne’er-do-well, never-present mother in Atlanta’s most depressed neighborhood, marginalized and demonized by the very community sworn to protect him, Michael’s fate was sealed. The boy—who sociologists called a “super predator”– was quickly shackled, shuffled though the polished, thick wood-paneled door and largely forgotten.

It should be said that, by and large, Atlanta’s black community—rife with political and economic power– looked on in shame and shrugged.

Sixteen years later, in a courtroom some 800 miles away, Lady Justice sang a very different song.

On June 15^th of this year Ethan Couch killed four innocent people.  That night, a 15-year-old Ethan and seven of his friends filled themselves up on two cases of beer stolen from a local Wal-Mart.

Pushing 70 miles per hour in a 40-mile zone, Ethan plowed his father’s purloined red Ford F-350 into a stranded motorist and three Good Samaritans. Twenty-four-year-old Breanna Mitchell, her friends Hollie and Shelby Boyles, and Brian Jennings, a local pastor who pulled over to help them, died that night. Two of Ethan’s friends were ejected from the back bed of the pick-up.  Both were critically injured. One of them, Sergio Molina, was paralyzed and cast into a vegetative state. When he emerged from a coma, he could communicate only by blinking his eyes.

There is no doubt Ethan stole the beer, no doubt he was drunk and recklessly “joy-riding” in his father’s company truck, no doubt that he was unlicensed and behind the wheel when he mowed down four helpless people.  In fact, young Ethan was so “torn down” that his blood alcohol registered at .24 — three times the legal limit — three hours after the accident. It was a wonder the teenager could walk and talk, let alone drive.

The facts of the case are replete with a tragic brand of mayhem that resulted in unspeakable carnage. Given the horrific facts of the incident, given the sheer level of human devastation inflicted, one would believe this to be an open-and-shut case. Ethan was convicted of four counts of intoxicated manslaughter and two counts of intoxicated assault. Prosecutors argued for and expected a sentence that matched the crime.

In various televised news reports, a neatly dressed, innocent-looking Ethan appears scrawny, barely filling out his button down shirt and khakis; his once long, blond hair nicely trimmed above the ears. He was not at all the imposing, muscle-bound creature snapping a “selfie” with his smartphone as seen in his Facebook profile.

That day in court, Ethan looked like America’s son.

During the sentencing phase, Ethan’s psychologist, Dick Miller, said his client suffers from “affluenza.” The junk-science diagnosis, used to describe a wealthy over-indulged child, was bought and paid for by his father. According to Miller, Ethan was the victim of overly permissive parents and had lost the capacity for responsible behavior.  In short, he was spoiled. Too spoiled to tell right from wrong or understand the consequences of his actions. Ethan presciently told officers that night that his parents would take care of this.

He could not have been more right.

Rather than remand him to prison, Texas District Court Judge Jean Boyd ordered Ethan into a private counseling center. His parents, Fred and Tonya Couch, will pick-up the estimated $450,000 tab.

The victims’ families sat stunned, soaking in their own tears.

I cannot help but wonder what the outcome might have been if Michael Lewis’ mother had been wealthy. What if she had been able to purchase a “Dream Team” to defend her son? What if she had been able to buy the testimony of a psychologist — one who would describe how Michael was reared in a cesspool of poverty without meaningful supervision? One that would say, with a straight face, that Michael suffered from “broke-itis,” that he, too, had been “spoiled” by the utter deprivation inherent in his living conditions, by the urban wasteland on which he was raised.  What if, instead of being a welfare-dependent crack fiend, his mother had owned a multi-million-dollar sheet metal company? What if she and her son had been white?

“What is the likelihood if this was an African-American, inner-city kid that grew up in a violent neighborhood to a single mother who is addicted to crack and he was caught two or three times,” Dr. Suniya, a Columbia University psychologist and researcher who studies the cost of affluence in suburban communities, pointedly asked. “What is the likelihood that the judge would excuse his behavior and let him off because of how he was raised?”

The record shows that same judge sentenced a 14-year-old African-American boy to ten years in juvenile for one death resulting from a punch.  Clearly, the cases Boyd decided are not identical. However, they clearly illustrate the impact individual wealth—and race– has on our criminal justice system. The proportion of poor men of color on death row, as well as the percentage of those confined in general populations of county, state and federal prisons say less about their propensity for crime than it does about a justice system marred by wealth and privilege.

But Judge Boyd did not believe Ethan belongs there.  Society, she decided, would be better served if he received private in-patient counseling. What if she had turned to that known and effective cure for Ethan’s strain of “affluenza?”

Jail.

Boyd, who had previously announced her retirement and who refuses to speak publicly about the case, faces fervent calls for her resignation. Texas law allows current Governor Rick Perry to remove her from the bench with approval of two-thirds of Texas legislature.

Little B is 30 years old now, locked away at Jackson State Correctional Facility for Men—where Troy Davis was executed– and has lost a bevy of appeals.  The Georgia Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court, despite the lying witnesses, the prosecutor’s flagrant, if not heinous, errors and the grossly inadequate defense, have both had their say.

In 2010, he led the nation’s largest system-wide inmate strike to protest poor living and working conditions in the Georgia correctional system. Using cellphones purchased from guards, the prisoners coordinated the strike amid widespread violence and brutality against the protestors.

Ethan is missing a warm dinner with his family tonight. He will miss his X-Box and all of the finer trappings of life. In time, though, he will emerge from therapy and likely inherit his portion of the Couch family fortune.

Michael has never seen an X-Box. He has never held a smartphone or had a Facebook account. Trapped in a drug-induced fog, his mother never baked a Thanksgiving ham or checked his homework. If his father is still out there, Michael has never met him.

Little B, who served his initial mandatory 14-year minimum, was denied parole in 2011. His minimum time served on the life sentence was revised to extend for five more  years. After 19 years behind bars, he will be up for parole review again in 2016.

Due to his participation in the inmate strike, he has spent the last three years in solitary confinement.