No one seems to be going to jail for it, though. Why?

Thaddeus Howze

Dec 12, 2016·7 min read

If you are offended about hearing about White men committing crimes and suffering no consequences, here is your trigger warning. Not because I give a damn about trigger warnings but because I want you in the right state of mind when you read this. Watch the video above before we begin.

For those of you who can’t be bothered watching the video: A high school athlete, David Becker, has been convicted of sexual assault, yet will spend zero time in jail. Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down.

I love the Young Turks because they challenge whatever they think injustice looks like and are willing to call it like it is. Today, this has made it across my desk because of the overall negative behaviors sweeping across the country. While this happened back in August, I see it as a trend gaining speed and repeated legal precedents being set normalizing such behaviors.

Many of the worst offenses are being done by White men who believe there should be no consequences for their actions, no matter how egregious they might be because this is their country and they should get to persecute anyone they deem offensive to their White nationalist, supremacist or racist mindsets.

America, in this pending age of his royal highness president-elect Trump, is increasingly hostile to women and minorities. This hostility used to be more covert. It used to be more invisible, more under the covers, hidden by propriety and privilege. It happened but you only heard about it second-hand, a rumor, a friend in the right place, the cleaning lady who worked at the court.

No more. In recent years the joys of wealth and white privilege have exploded, moved to the front page where social ills are now paraded in the mainstream and we are told as a nation: “Suck it up, buttercup.” This is White America and we are going to do exactly whatever we want. When we want to. To whomever we want to.

Remember the “Affluenza Defense?” Let me help:

Ethan Couch, a Texas teenager who killed four people while driving drunk was sentenced this week to 10 years of probation in lieu of jail time, after the defense argued that the 16-year-old was a product of “affluenza” — a condition in which growing up wealthy prevents children from understanding the links between their behavior and the consequences because they are rarely held accountable for their actions.

The judge’s light sentence has outraged the families of the victims and baffled some legal experts.

Couch was tried as a juvenile and charged with four counts of intoxication manslaughter for the June 15 crash, according to a local Texas ABC affiliate. Youth pastor Brian Jennings, 24-year-old Breanna Mitchel and mother and daughter Hollie Boyles and Shelby Boyles were killed in the crash. Several others were injured.

Couch was driving 60 to 70 mph in a 40-mph zone and had a blood alcohol content of .24, three times the legal limit for drivers in Texas. Testimony indicated that toxicology reports also found Valium in his system, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspaper.

Intoxication manslaughter is a second-degree felony in Texas and usually carries a sentence of two to 20 years in prison.

“Affluenza” — the inability to be charged for your actions because being raised with too much money meant you were unable to be responsible for your actions.

Get the fuck outta here, your honor. “I’m too rich, pretty, talented, young (and white) to have to go to jail for years.”

Meanwhile we have been jailing Black men for the suspicion of having a marijuana seed in their car for two decades. Hell, the justice system put Black men in jail for resisting arrest while they are being wrongfully arrested. If they put up too much protest, they are just summarily executed on the spot.

Picture, if you will…

A country where you could rape a woman, unconscious and not resisting, and even if caught you could manage to, with the help of an attorney, escape any of the long-term consequences. You don’t have to imagine such a place any longer. You’re soaking in it; we are a rapine nation in the metaphorical flesh.

You need to have certain requirements, though. You have to have the right complexion, possess a liberal degree of fiduciary lubrication to grease the right judicial wheels allowing you to engage in rape without consequences.

Here is the horror as I see it. It’s not just the fact these offenders are exposing someone to personal risk, disease, pregnancy, psychological discord that may stay with the woman for the rest of her life without any personal concern one way or the other.

What pisses me off more than anything is: They all claim this is the first time they have ever done something like this. No one wakes up one day and says: Today will be the day I rape. No premeditation. No fear of consequence.

You did it once, you have probably done it as a lifestyle choice. Coffee or rape. I’ll take rape, no, two thank you.

It really is appropriate when you think about it. These bastards, yes, I said it, these bastards decided they could see themselves raping someone who cannot defend themselves and saw themselves getting away with it.

In essence: NO FUCKS GIVEN, pardon the euphemism. Not man enough to learn the skills required to get a woman to be interested in your sorry ass, you just decided rape was the answer to the dilemma of no one being willing to give you any.

Fuck you. The same way the inmates of whatever institutional facility would have done had you been tried and convicted the way the justice system does anyone else who is even thought to have committed rape. Your history of raping would have been mitigated, or at least, momentarily halted as you were indoctrinated into the “You look like you wanted to be raped, club.”

This isn’t the first time you raped. This is the first time someone stood up for themselves and told you: no more. And instead of having justice being served: you going to jail, you registering for the rest of your life as a sex offender, having the world being aware of what a predatory bastard you are and people keeping their children, sons and daughters safe from you, instead your parents and their wealth will allow you to walk free.

Instead, no prison time. No responsibility for your actions, no acknowledgement of wrong-doing that matters. You escape the consequences of your monstrous actions, because rape is a monstrous action, no matter how it is white-washed in this society, rapists are monsters. Yes, I said it.

And only in America, founded on rape, murder and the displacement of native people can a White man say to a member of the justice system: It wouldn’t be fair to this rapist to have his life destroyed for a youthful indiscretion.

— A youthful indiscretion is a joyride around the block in your father’s car.

— Attending a party with your friends, on a school night, that had illegal age drinking.

— Getting busted with a joint during a random traffic stop.

— Shoplifting from a local liquor store (granted where I grew up, it might get you shot before the police got there)

These are youthful indiscretions. These are the kind of interactions which should not get you locked up for years with people with histories of assault, battery, rape and murder in their past. People who will most assuredly rape you repeatedly during your two to ten year stay behind bars.

You should not be exempt from paying a debt to society when you assault, harm and rape ANYONE.

• And if being tried for rape is inconvenient for you, it should be.
• If it requires you to be registered as a sexual offender, and makes it difficult for you to find work and difficult for you to find places willing to put up with your previous reprehensible behavior, good.
• Maybe, when you are thinking of dropping your trousers and attacking an unconscious innocent, you might stop to think — hey, if I get caught, I may find myself in jail with large burly murderers who might decide the best thing they can look forward to during their long prison sentences, is me. Repeatedly with vigor and enthusiasm. No sleeping for you, either.

Judges and judicial systems which do not punish rapists harm society by sending the wrong messages to the populace at large. The message they think they are sending is White men are exempt from the law when they rape. (Or whatever the crime de jour is when we are seeing them in the justice system…)

The real message is more insidious. They are telling women and the men who love them, to take matters into their own hands to get the justice they are being denied.

No one should have to take the law into their own hands to see justice gets done. But like rape, it is an American tradition with long, deep roots in our history.

Looks like its going to make a comeback, just like rape has. God help us all.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

— Frederick Douglass

Thaddeus Howze is a writer, essayist, author and professional storyteller for mysterious beings who exist in non-Euclidean realms beyond our understanding. You can follow him on Twitter or support his writings on Patreon.