Reply #16: Long story

[Mabus]

gist of it is I got burnt out, big time. For the most part, I was spending too much time in the company of heinous murderers and pedophiles during my waking hours. In the evenings and weekends I was reading trial transcripts, going over police reports, crime photos, medical reports and it got to be too much for me emotionally. I think the final straw was the woman who murdered her own child because it took up too much of her time and was interfering with what little time she had for her affair with a neighbor. After several attempts by several different methods (some of them quite brutal) she was finally successful at killing her child. She disposed of the body by "taking it out with the rest of the garbage." There was something about the cruelty that a mother could heap upon her own child that started giving me nightmares. There was something that doesn't sit right when a mother calls her own child it and equates it with garbage.

I was, for a long time, one of those people that put everything I had into whatever I was doing. If I was working on something, I lived it, I breathed it, I knew the facts of each case cold. At some point, I found that what I was doing was having an emotional toll on me. I'm not sure if it was the killer mom or the kid that I was representing whose parents began pimping him out when he was about eighteen months old or if it was the pedophile I helped get out on appeal that pushed me to rethink what I was doing. All I know is that I just stopped enjoying what I was doing and needed a breather. I had begun looking at people in a totally different and disturbing way. I would be at the grocery store and see a young mother scolding her child and I would have trouble breathing. I'd see someone who resembled the pedophile near a school and my heart would catch in my throat. I knew it wasn't the guy I helped free but, in my mind, it could be someone like him. So I walked away while I still had some of my own sanity left.

fwiw, I have been thinking about going back but with a different emphasis but I'm in no big hurry.