People can be villians and try to take a lot from you; but you cannot let them take what makes you, you. Everything that you see and every interaction you have has a footprint on your life in some way. Seeing an accident, an act of kindness or a crime impacts every person in different ways. People interpret and filter things differently. We all have filters, it is just a matter of whether they are Britta's, Pur, Zero Water or the the reliance of the mass filter at the public water treatment facility on the tap water.
Often not having any direct involvement in a matter other than the preparation and trial gets you as emotionally involved as a family member, regardless of whether you wanted it. Sometimes a case is like that relative that you just have to deal with at every family reunion that no one really wants to see. Sometimes that case eats at you because you know there is something more to it.
On any sentencing day it is always upsetting. The upset reaches far past the Defendant and the victims' families. In every courtroom on every floor there may be sentencing taken place where there will always be happy and sad people and often many overcome with emotion. In many ways people view it as resolve and being over, but for many the result has just begun.
I look around the courtrooms on sentencing days and I see more victims than the complainant. I see victims on both sides of the aisle. The Defendant goes into custody and the life of everyone one around him changes. The grandmother who already lives on a fixed income that does not make ends meet will go without even more to send money for a commissary account, she will incur the most expensive long distance collect call fees, and she will have a heartache and grief filled guilt that overcomes everything that she thought was. The emptiness in her face only is magnified by the flow of her tears while she sits with perfect posture in her best church clothes. The children are now alone in the world with one parent or often a grandparent as the sole support of their family with no financial or emotional support. The already tight belt around the finances that has suffocated every breath of hope has now been tightened. Other friends and family will incur and accept other related responsibilities; but the child will never have a bond with this parent.
Down the hall in another courtroom a mother is reading her impact statement to the Court. She is overcome with an upset and grief that has sped up the natural aging process ten fold. A man that was convicted of killing her daughter is then sentenced to sixty years in prison added to the time he is already serving for something else.
At the end of the day we all go to our respective homes and kick off our shoes. Every step each of us takes is different. Some on carpet that leaves a mark, some on tile or stone, some on hardwood, others on concrete; but what is the same for all of us is how everyone one around us has an impact in our lives in some ways, even if unintended and by observation.
