As the old year crawled to an end, we all received a respite from boring campaign news by a reprise of the "affluenza" story. To review: lawyers for Ethan Couch maintain that his parents spoiled him so thoroughly that he cannot tell right from wrong, that is, he is insane. They lost on that point, and he was convicted of drunk driving that resulted in the death of four people. BUT the sentencing judge seems to have concluded that there was a mitigating factor there, because he suspended the sentence of imprisonment. Maybe the judge simply wanted to reward the creation of a clever portmanteau. Anyway, Couch never spent a day in lock up over those four deaths, although as a convicted felon he was required to check in regularly with his probation officer, and to give up alcohol. Apparently, upon the surfacing of a video suggesting that he was violating the latter condition, he violated the former. He has disappeared. So, in two sentences: 1) Couch was thought to have...
