Lawyers, Mental Health, School Shootings, etc.
 

Florida Bar Journal – Mental Health: The Issue of Our Time – The Florida Bar

Thought this might spark some interesting discussion and it comes soon after the school shooting in Ocala which is yet again a person in dire need of mental health treatment or someone gaming the system which also happens. Get off of a serious criminal charge by pleading you were mentally ill when you committed a crime.

Lawyers do get depressed and some even commit suicide because of the burden of their jobs. Other professions also seem to see this like soldiers suffering of post traumatic stress syndrome, dentists, etc.

The Parkland shooter seems just like someone who wanted to do evil for evil's sake.

The law in FL on mental health as the FL Bar President writes does seem extremely outdated.

I follow various Bar Associations on Facebook. Kind of a hobby.

I have often wondered how lawyers who defend serious criminals and know they are guilty can sleep at night. It has to be very hard to watch a murderer go free because you are good at your job.

I did work for prisoners at the Minnesota Correctional Facility -- Stillwater while a student at the U of MN Law School. I remember being given a severe scolding by a judge because I was putting in the papers of a name change of a particularly notorious inmate. I even had a hard time meeting the man at Stillwater prison. Hard to hide my loathing of him. But the law did give him the right to change his name and his victim(s) would have been notified of the name change.

I did become a law librarian though because of this kind of stuff. Some of the inmates were just people who had made bad mistakes.

I had contact with about 40 of these inmates in some form or another as a student attorney and then as a supervisor of other student attorneys. Going into the MN prisons was also an experience. I was very glad when those doors opened on the way out. We had to meet every new prisoner who had a Legal Assistance to Minnesota Prisoners (LAMP) case in person. Or the student attorney did.

So much of the practice of law is very tedious. And so many people do not like lawyers.

Incidentally the Younger brothers from the Northfield MN bank robbery started the prison newspaper for the Stillwater prison. These are the Younger brothers who rode with the James brothers.

You really need to compartmentalize which I cannot do that is why I liked working with computer systems and networks. There are a thousand ways they can fail but the bottom line is they either work or they don't, there are no moral dilemmas.

Sometimes it is impossible to do. Compartmentalize, I mean. Me and my then live-in law student girlfriend had a stalker for nine months (September - May) or so while I was on the U of MN Law Library reference desk. I had just graduated from the U of MN in May of 1989. I tried to help her with her case-- she was defending herself after chaining herself to the desk of a U of MN Mathematics Professor-- but the other guys and gals working the reference desk did not try to help all that much. So I and my girlfriend (Class of 1990) became her obsession but the law library could or would not do much of anything about it on the theory of access to legal information when presenting your own defense. She finally followed me home one afternoon and then they acted.

I could not compartmentalize with this woman as she crossed borders of accepted behavior.

This was a defense I assume for a criminal case but am not sure. The U of MN and the professor might have been suing her.

My live-in girlfriend did everything she could think of to prevent this stalking as she got the worst of it when I left for Northern CA for the holiday break and some vacation.

I know the laws are supposed to protect the innocent but sometimes I wonder if they actually protect the guilty more.

It is hard to balance and a HUGE problem is when some people can hire an army of lawyers to defend them while others only get an extremely over-worked public defender. Some public defender offices are much better than others, of course.

Yes very sad that money can be such a factor, but then money determines a lot of things it shouldn't.