What is the Difference Between Intoxication Assault and Intoxication Manslaughter?

Hello everyone. This is Deandra Grant, and this is the Ask Deandra series, where I answer the most commonly searched questions about Texas DWIs on the internet. I also write a blog called the Ask Deandra blog, and the corresponding blog to today’s topic will be down in the description with a link. So if you want to read more about this topic, you can go to that page.

Today’s question is: what is the difference between intoxication assault and intoxication manslaughter in Texas?

First of all, let’s talk about how they’re the same. Number one is they both involve an accident, a serious accident where someone was either injured or died, and where there is an allegation that the intoxication of one of the drivers, the person who’s charged, caused that death or serious bodily injury. So if you have a situation where there is a wreck, for example, in the middle of an intersection, maybe one car ran the red light, and the person who ran the red light is believed to be intoxicated on some substance, which may be alcohol, drugs, or a combination, then that person can be charged with intoxication assault if one of the people in the car that they hit suffers serious bodily injury.

The law defines what would qualify as serious bodily injury versus what is just considered bodily injury. For serious bodily injury you’re looking at, you know, broken bones, paralysis, very serious injuries. For example, a laceration, things of that nature, that’s not really going to count as serious bodily injury, or disfigurement unless it’s severe. So there’s a lot of gray area on what is serious bodily injury and what’s bodily injury. There’s a lot of case law in Texas about what is what. That’s something that sometimes in these cases becomes a contested point. We’ve definitely had cases before where the question of whether the injuries were serious bodily injury or bodily injury was what we were fighting over.

Now let’s say we’re not talking about a question of injury; the question of someone dying is the issue. If someone dies in that accident, then you’re looking at being charged with intoxication manslaughter.

In terms of differences in punishment, intoxication assault is a third-degree felony. It carries 2 to 10 years as a punishment range in prison in Texas. Whereas intoxication manslaughter is a second-degree felony, and it carries 2 to 20 years as a possible punishment range in the penitentiary.

Both of those have the possibility of being enhanced a degree if the person who suffered serious bodily injury or was killed was a public servant. For example, if you were to become involved in an accident or even hit someone while intoxicated and they were a police officer out performing their duties, or a fireman or someone like that, then you’re looking at having that crime enhanced. If they suffered serious bodily injury, it would go from a third-degree intoxication assault to an enhanced intoxication assault, which would be a second degree. If the person died, then your second-degree intoxication manslaughter becomes a first degree, which carries 5 to 99 years in the penitentiary.

In Texas, unlike other states, when people are sentenced, they are not sentenced to a range. They are sentenced to a specific number of years. You may have seen in movies or on court TV, someone is found guilty of a crime and the judge says, “I’m sentencing you to between 15 and 30 years in prison,” or something like that. That’s not how sentencing works in Texas. Our statutes carry a range that each crime has. For example, on the second-degree felony, 2 to 20 years, that means if you’re convicted of that offense, you could receive two, five, 10, 15, 20, anywhere within the range you could be sentenced, but you get a specific number and not a range. So that makes Texas just a little different than some other states that do the ranges in sentencing.

Let’s talk a little bit also about the issue of causation, because this is a very common issue in intoxication assault and intoxication manslaughter cases, of which we handle quite a few. Causation is the concept that the person who was alleged to have been intoxicated, their intoxication caused the death or serious bodily injury.

Let’s go back to the wreck in the intersection. Let’s say that a person who may or may not have been intoxicated, but is alleged to be, police officers believe this person was intoxicated, was driving through the intersection, but they had the green light, and the person who ran the red light and ended up being killed or seriously injured caused the accident. It wasn’t the person who was alleged to be intoxicated. Or let’s just say they were intoxicated. We’re not even arguing about that. They’re intoxicated, they’re driving through a green light, perfectly normal. The other car runs the red light and somebody dies. Are you going to be charged with intoxication manslaughter? You may be initially, but when the police figure out how this accident happened, then intoxication manslaughter is not the correct charge. The correct charge would be misdemeanor DWI, because the person who was intoxicated, their intoxication did not cause this accident. It was the other person’s driving.

Surprisingly, this comes up quite a bit. We’ve handled many cases where causation was really the defense in the case, and what started out as an intoxication manslaughter or an intoxication assault got reduced down to a misdemeanor because the person who was intoxicated did not cause the accident. You’d probably be surprised how often that’s the issue.

And then another defense, obviously, in every case in which intoxication is alleged: the defense may be the person wasn’t intoxicated at all. Yes, they caused the accident. Yes, that accident led to a death or serious bodily injury, but they weren’t intoxicated. So that may also be your defense in a particular case like this.

Hopefully this helps you understand, if you’re facing these kinds of charges or a loved one is facing them, that that’s basically the difference between the two and an idea of how those cases get defended. If you want more information, you can go read the blog post that corresponds with this video. See you next time.