Final thoughts from my rocking chair.

• Author: Chiles, Christopher D.
• Position: President's page

THIS PAST YEAR has been a very special one in my life. I have had the honor, as president of NDAA, to serve you and, as our motto says, "To be the voice of America's Prosecutors and to Support Their Efforts to Protect the Rights and Safety of the People." It has been an unbelievable honor and I am proud to have been that voice and support those efforts on behalf of America's 39,000 prosecutors located in over 3,000 offices across the country.

I am also proud to be a prosecuting attorney and, as I have often said this past year, I believe we should all be proud to be prosecutors because as we all know, we are ... the real public defenders. We fulfill the second part of our motto every day as we protect the rights and safety of the people in every city and county in this country.

One of my themes this year has been that people go into prosecution for one of two reasons: either to get a lot of trial experience quickly before chasing the big money or because they have the passion to be a prosecutor. Both of these are very valid reasons. I hope that if you started prosecuting just to get the trial experience before moving on, that along the way you developed the passion and decided to stay in prosecution. If you started in prosecution because you had the passion, I hope you still have it. I began prosecuting because I had the passion and after almost 30 years I still have that passion. I consider myself very blessed to be able to say that.

So, regardless of which reason caused you to start in prosecution, why stay in prosecution? Maybe you stay because every day you look into the eyes of people who have been victimized by crime. You may look into the eyes of the parent, spouse or child of a murder victim who looks to you to hold accountable the person who took their loved one from them. You may look into the...