It's been a long week at a child abuse conference. Imagine a week of classes filled with all the horrible ways that people can hurt children. It's awful, but probably one of the conferences I most look forward to every year. It's always amazing to me how much I still have to learn after doing this for such a long time. And it's nice to have a ( Read more... )

For my friend S., the man who sometimes cannot see his own magnificent wings.

CompassI have watched your journey from a distance ( Read more... )

It’s funny how sometimes the things of most consequence to us happen so slowly that we hardly notice them. I lost my voice and I can’t even remember when it happened. I just know that I reached a point where I had nothing to say. I suppose it was not so much nothing to say as nothing that I wanted to say out loud. I didn’t want to say out loud ( Read more... )

In a criminal case, the victim has a right to make a statement after the defendant is sentenced. This is called the victim's allocution. It is the single time that the victim is able to address the defendant directly, to speak her mind, to spill out everything that she's been choking down for months and months. I was witness to many of these ( Read more... )

For the first time in a long time, I hate waking up in the mornings. I tell myself it's stress--job, money, relationships, derby...you name it. I wake up and in that instant that I realize I'm awake, everything comes crashing in on me and all I can do is wish myself back to sleep. Of course, I don't have the luxury of being that self-indulgent ( Read more... )

I’ve been making my peace lately with something so profoundly difficult and painful that it’s taken over a year to even be able to talk about it. I finally have had to let go of the idea that I will be going back to my old job. When I left Texas, I left behind a career as a senior felony prosecutor at an office that I loved. One of my best ( Read more... )