Story highlights Texas teenager won't go to jail for drunk driving incident that killed four people

Paul Callan says lawyer is citing a defense of "affluenza," not an acceptable argument

He says judge should have refused to accept deal, should have blasted "affluenza" idea

Callan: Justice is supposed to be impartial, not a tool to allow rich to escape responsibility

Paul Callan, a CNN legal analyst, is a former New York homicide prosecutor and media law professor. Follow him on Twitter: @PaulCallan This article was originally published in 2013.

(CNN) American lawyers have never been accused of lacking creativity in seeking to justify the nefarious deeds of their clients. Texas defense attorney Scott Brown, however, appears to have raised the bar to a new level by asserting the newly minted defense of "affluenza" to obtain leniency in a tragic vehicular homicide case arising out of the reckless driving of his very drunk and very rich 16-year-old client, Ethan Couch.

Affluenza may be a contender for a collection of odd and unlikely defenses that can trace their lineage back to the infamous (and some even say apocryphal) "Twinkie defense." The notorious junk food defense was asserted in psychiatric testimony as part of a broad claim of diminished capacity caused by depression with at least some success in the 1979 trial of Supervisor Dan White for the assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Although White was charged with murder, the jury found him guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter.

The current claim in Fort Worth, Texas, is that the condition of affluenza, a combination of the words "affluence" and "influenza" should immunize Ethan Couch from full responsibility for his actions in killing four people and critically injuring two others.

The Oxford Dictionary defines the condition as "a psychological malaise supposedly affecting young people, symptoms of which include a lack of motivation, feelings of guilt, and a sense of isolation." Defense attorney Brown apparently succeeded in convincing soon-to-be retired juvenile Judge Jean Boyd that this spoiled rich kid syndrome diminished Ethan Couch's capacity to distinguish right from wrong.

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