"it makes my head hurt. it makes my heart hurt."

Here are Throckmorton's latest adventures in public defense, with a sad - but - true epiphany about the Sixth Amendment:
while the constitution guarantees a right to counsel, nowhere does the law guarantee that a criminal defendant gets to have unlimited access to his/her attorney and have his/her hand held throughout the process...

if i'm truly going to do this work, i'd better build up a thicker skin. what i fear in that process, though, is crossing the line from thick-skinned to calloused... it's going to be a real struggle to compartmentalize how available i'll be able to be versus how emotionally involved i can become.

Stick with it, Emily. Most of us in the ranks are still trying to figure this out too.