In 1966, I was driving back from my port leave before my scheduled year of vacation in sunny Vietnam when I met a drunken driver proceeding up the Interstate in the wrong direction. He died on the spot. I spent seven months in a military hospital and suffered injuries that affect my life to this day.
In 1981, I called my 7 year old son's best friend to see if I should swing by and get him so the boys could hit soccer practice early. A family friend answered the phone and I soon found myself in the uncomfortable position of telling Paul that Gabe would not be coming to soccer practice, then or ever, as a result of an encounter with a drunken driver.
It's not true that having your life touched---make that clobbered---by a particular offense, renders you unable to fairly determine whether somebody in fact committed that offense.
Oh, sometimes the emotions take over temporarily. I had to go to the local judges after I had to try a particularly horrible child abuse case and asked to be excused from those kinds of cases for a while. It was not a problem. While you never "get over it," you do get some distance.
When I was elected to a court that heard drunk driving cases, I was not looking for revenge but to change things.
Why, you may ask, did I not float the proposal in the op-ed below from Indian Country Today to the Texas Legislature? I did, twice. Both years, they laughed me out of the hearing room.