Rash of Kentucky lawyer suicides concerns colleagues

[Silent_Bob]

http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20130602/NEWS01/306020065/Rash-of-Kentucky-lawyer-suicides-concerns-colleagues

One was a former University of Kentucky basketball player who practiced in Leitchfield, Ky. Another had been commonwealth's attorney in Kenton County.

A third was a Louisville lawyer who helped battle the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Louisville over cases of priest abuse — and whose Facebook photos still show him snowboarding, scuba diving and sightseeing with his family.

Jim Dinwiddie, Harry Rankin and Ross Turner all died in a similar way: They killed themselves.

So did Michael Jamison and Brent Travelsted of Bowling Green, Tod Megibow of Paducah, William P. Whalen Jr. of Fort Wright, Finis Raymond Price III and Dan Thomas Schwartz of Louisville, David Andrew of Crescent Springs, Leroy "Lee" Rowland of Lexington and Brad Goheen of Calvert City.

They are among at least a dozen lawyers in Kentucky who have committed suicide since 2010, including three in Louisville and three in Northern Kentucky. Half died in the past 12 months. All were men, their average age 53, and most were trial lawyers.

Kentucky doesn't track suicides by occupation. But citing his recollection from 38 years of practice — and amid studies that show lawyers are six times more likely to kill themselves than the general population — Kentucky Bar Association President Doug Myers said the number of suicides among the state's 17,500 lawyers is "disproportionate" and "disconcerting."

Myers, who was so concerned that he wrote about the issue in a recent edition of the bar association's quarterly journal, said in an interview that he doesn't remember any similar spate of suicides by lawyers earlier in his career.

In a recent post, legal blogger Shannon Ragland, publisher of the Kentucky Trial Court Review, called the suicides by "middle-aged trial lawyers" an "apparent epidemic" and said the issue deserves serious attention and study by the KBA and the Kentucky Justice Association, the state trial lawyer group.
'Broken-hearted idealists'

The KBA's Kentucky Lawyer Assistance Program offers confidential help to attorneys with depression, but citing its confidentiality rules, director Yvette Hourigan said she couldn't say how many — if any — of the lawyers who have killed themselves in recent years had sought its aid.

Myers said that suicide by lawyers is shrouded in stigma and needs to be "out in the open."

Bar officials say they believe that stress is at the root of the recent suicides.

"You take on the burden of your clients' problems, then pile them on your own, and it takes a toll," Myers said.

State Supreme Court Justice Bill Cunningham, who wrote about the topic in the Russellville News Democrat Leader last year, said some lawyers ("broken-hearted idealists," he calls them) just give up.

"They learn that justice is not always done. Innocent people are abused and some go to prison. People guilty of terrible wrongs go free," Cunningham wrote. "They worry that all the lost hours and missed holidays with family and friends ... do not matter. ... They become like a weak-kneed boxer in the 15th round. They keep flailing away. But they lose purpose. They lose hope."

Lanny Berman, director of the Washington-based American Association of Suicidology, said the competitiveness and perfectionism that make good lawyers — and the lack of fulfillment many lawyers feel in practicing law — put them at high risk of alcoholism, drug use, depression and suicide.

There are no recent studies of the suicide rate nationally for lawyers, in part because most states don't track suicide by occupation. But some older studies suggest it is higher and that lawyers are far more likely to suffer from depression, which is often linked to suicide.

Lawyers acknowledge that few will sympathize with their plight.

"Everybody hates lawyers," said Louisville trial lawyer Hans Poppe, "except for their own lawyer."
Myriad reasons possible for suicide

Interviews with family members and friends of Kentucky lawyers who took their own lives suggest there was no single thread that explained their actions.

One of the lawyers had recently found that his wife had been unfaithful, while another was discovered to have been unfaithful to his wife.

One was out of work, while another, Travelsted, a Bowling Green personal injury lawyer who shot himself on April 21, was highly successful. Friends such as state Court of Appeals Judge Kelly Thompson said he was despondent over a broken engagement.

One of the lawyers jumped off a bridge, while the rest ended their lives in their homes or offices.

Experts caution that the reasons for suicides sometime are never known, although some seem more obvious:

• Louisville lawyer Harry B. "Hank" Diamond, for example, was a fugitive who had been indicted for allegedly filing false income tax returns — he had failed to pay federal taxes for 10 years — when he shot himself in the head on April 17, 2009, in the parking garage of a casino in Gulfport, Miss.

• Justice Department attorney Nicholas Marsh, a St. Xavier High School graduate who wasn't licensed in Kentucky, took his life in September 2010 after he came under investigation with other prosecutors for possible misconduct in the conviction of former U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska. Stevens' conviction was set aside after allegations that prosecutors had failed to disclose evidence.

Marsh's lawyer, Robert Luskin of Washington, said after his death that "Nick loved being a prosecutor, and I think he was incredibly fearful that this would prevent him from continuing to work for the Justice Department."

• Turner, 48, served as a law clerk to U.S. District Court Judge Joseph H. McKinley Jr. and was regarded as a brilliant legal writer, but struggled for years with substance abuse, said Poppe, who practiced with him when they both worked for lawyer William McMurry.

Another trial lawyer, Larry Jones, said Turner struggled with running a solo practice and never recovered from the emotional scars of fighting the priest-abuse cases.

"Ross never seemed the same to me," Jones said.

• Rankin, 58, who served as Kenton commonwealth's attorney in 1983, faced a "perfect storm" of "medical, family and financial issues," according to his former lawyer partner, Mike Sutton, president of the Northern Kentucky Bar Association.

Attorney Eric Deters, who had offered Rankin a job just before his death, said he was depressed in part because he couldn't get enough cases. Deters said he learned later that Rankin had sought help from the Lawyer Assistance Program and that he was being treated at a psychiatric hospital in Bowling Green when he hanged himself.

• Megibow, 61, a transplanted New Yorker who once was fit enough to play for the Paducah Flood rugby team, had undergone several backsurgeries and suffered through terrible pain, said Andrew Coiner, who previously rented space from him.

"He stated to me that he didn't want to be a burden," Coiner said.

• Dinwiddie, 63, who returned to his hometown of Leitchfield after his career playing guard from 1968 to 1971 for UK coach Adolph Rupp, suffered from depression, said his son, James "Jay" Dinwiddie, who lives in Atlanta.

The younger Dinwiddie said he believes his father's practice — a mix of grim criminal, divorce and domestic-violence cases — contributed to his father's suicide.

"Just reading his cases I got depressed," said Jay Dinwiddie, who reviewed them as executor of his father's estate. "I got a crash course in law, and it is not what it is cracked up to be."

Dinwiddie's brother, Bill, a retired licensed clinical social worker who worked for 40 years in the mental health field, said his brother suffered from depression. He ran for county attorney and was devastated when he lost, then had a chaotic marriage that collapsed.

While depression was his underlying problem, his practice as an attorney "irritated" it, Bill Dinwiddie said.

"I think there are certainly personality structures drawn to law — a determination to win and a need to see black and white," he said. "And life is not always black and white."
Helping others

Myers, the bar president, said Kentucky's lawyers must be alert to the problems of fellow lawyers and "take on a responsibility for our peers" — in part by referring them to the Kentucky Lawyer Assistance Program, which has launched a depression support program in Louisville.

"As lawyers, we are very good at referring other troubled people for help," Myers wrote in the bar journal. "We need to do the same for ourselves."

[Jim Johnson]

"They learn that justice is not always done. Innocent people are abused and some go to prison. People guilty of terrible wrongs go free,"