The Civil-Prosecutorial Alliance
Although it has been almost twenty years, I still vividly remember the first intoxication manslaughter case that I handled as a prosecutor. Like most cases of that nature, it was heartbreaking. More heartbreaking than most, actually. The victim was a young student at Rice University. She and three of her friends had gone to her parents' house to eat dinner before going to get ice cream at Amy's Ice Cream at Shepherd & Highway 59. When they were finished with their dessert, they headed back towards their dorm on campus. It couldn't have been a more innocent evening for a group of college students. Traveling down Bissonnet at over 70 miles per hour was the highly intoxicated defendant in a large-sized pick-up truck. He'd been drinking all day and had reached the point where he had no inhibitions about how recklessly he drove. As he approached the intersection with Durham, there was a red light, and a car stopped in the lane ahead of him. Not to be slowed down,