Families of Ethan Couch's victims find comfort in judge upholding jail time

Families of the affluenza teen's victims say the recent order that will keep Ethan Couch in jail for the next two years brings them comfort.

"They're happy because they think these are consequences,” said attorney Greg Coontz.

The attorney says the families of the victims were relieved when the judge in the case stuck to his original punishment. It assured the so called affluenza teen would spend roughly the next two years or 720 days in jail.

"They felt like that's enough time to hopefully get his attention because that's certainly significant consequences particularly from the original judge's ruling,” said Coontz.

Coontz represented the families of two of Couch's victims. The teen drove drunk back in 2013 and killed four people and injured several others.

A juvenile court judge sentenced couch to a ten-year probation. But his probation was in question when a video surfaced of what appeared to be him at a beer party.

After the release of the video, he and his mother fled to Mexico in December. When they were captured and brought back to the U.S., his probation was transferred to adult court.

Two days after his nineteenth birthday in April, a state district judge punished couch with 720 days in jail. His attorney's objected in court.

Couch’s attorneys formally objected on Monday with a court filing and quoted Judge Wayne Salvant as saying that day, “I'm going to also give you folks some additional time to convince me that I'm wrong or tell me something else that I might need as far as probationary terms."

His attorneys tried to convince the judge in an objection document that his order was not just wrong, but against the law. They said the ruling was "not consistent with the conditions ordered by the juvenile court and is, therefore, unauthorized and illegal".

The document again quoted Judge Salvant as saying, "Of course nothing I do is in stone so I might reconsider."

But Salvant did not reconsider and issued his order on Wednesday which read, “The terms and conditions of probation imposed on April 13th, 2016 shall remain as previously ordered".

That order, in effect, canceled a hearing that was scheduled for Monday and solidified Couch's jail time.

"So the fact that the judge went ahead and signed the order was, I'd say, a pleasant surprise and existed very positively by the families,” said Coontz.