Piling on

Did an uncontested fault divorce yesterday in which the pro se defendant failed to appear.  To prove the defendant’s habitual intoxication required testimony and evidence of his extremely heavy drinking.  The result was a brief, incomplete, biography of a life devolved into a tragic waste.  Not quite as depressing to hear as to live through, but still….

Any time one is trying to prove “fault” in an uncontested divorce, there’s a tension between providing enough evidence to justify the fault divorce and inundating the judge with the other party’s misdeeds as a form of “piling on.”  There’s something profoundly, almost existentially, depressing about these types of hearings.  I wish the judges would simply interrupt me with a “that’s enough” but they don’t.   If other attorneys have suggestions on how to prove fault without appearing to revel in tragedy, I’m open to suggestion.