If lawyers do drink more than the general population, it may come from having to argue cases like State of South Dakota v. Leonard Alan Toohey. In 2011, a ten-year-old girl testified in court that when she was seven, Toohey, a then 60-year-old family friend, had raped her. The jury believed her, and the judge gave Toohey 20 years for first-degree rape.
Toohey appealed, claiming the victim had not been available for cross-examination. Yesterday, the South Dakota Supreme Court filed its opinion in the case. After having to sift through arguments about the semantics of a ten-year-old child's efforts to put into words anatomy and violations that a child cannot and should not have to understand, four of the five justices upheld the verdict and sentence from Butte County. The witness, writes Justice John J. Konenkamp, was competent. She answered questions from the defense attorney; the defense simply chose not to ask all the questions it could have. The child's language, though imprecise, met the standards set in other cases to establish rape. Only Justice Glen Severson dissented, saying that the state provided insufficient evidence of sexual penetration to support the first-degree rape charge.
The Supreme Court's ruling is grim and graphic. Dealing with such language, such stories, and sickness and sadness with impartiality must exact a hard psychic toll.
I went to college to become a psychiatrist, specifically a child psychiatrist. It took only one week of me listening to case studies and interviews of children who had been abused (physically, sexually, mentally) for me to decide that there was absolutely no way I could ever have that for a career. I would probably be a raging alcoholic and/or seeing my own psychiatrist right now had I continued on that career path. I could completely understand how working with those types of cases could drive someone into drinking and/or other methods of coping.