True Grit: The Importance of Passion and Perseverance in Career Prosecutors.

• Author: Pilmer, Rhoda

THE PHONE RINGS--the jury has reached a verdict. I've been working on this case for years, developing relationships with the witnesses and victim's family. The defendant killed a young child with such callous disregard that I know the jury will see through her defense and hold her accountable. As I make my way to the courthouse, climb the stairs and walk the long, quiet hallway my heart is beating out of my chest. The jury walks in. Some are silently crying. Most of them will not look at me. I hold a pen and stare down at my note pad while anxiously waiting for the judge to read the verdict forms. I still believe justice will be served. A guilty verdict won't bring back the child's life, but it will hold the defendant accountable for her actions.

Then the judge reads: "Not guilty, count one." The words take my breath away. This is not how it was supposed to be. This is not how this case was supposed to end. As the jury leaves the courtroom, I hold it together long enough to walk past the victim's family, the officers, the media, and my colleagues. I find a private conference room down the hall. I walk in, close the door, and finally let the tears come. I can't understand how this happened, let alone how to begin to move forward.

If we do this work for any significant period of time we will all have cases like this. The family and the victim touch us in ways that we cannot describe. We strive for months and years to hold a defendant accountable for horrible crimes. We see the evidence as overwhelming and unassailable and, yet, the verdict is "not guilty." These cases stay with us like scars. And even as we struggle to make sense of what happened, our work is not over. We have more responsibilities and more cases that follow. How can we move forward? How can we hold our heads up and move on to the next one? How can we develop as prosecutors and as an organization?

There is no single trait, technique, or psychological concept that can help a prosecutor navigate the ups and downs of a career that, at its core, puts the most important outcomes in the hands of twelve members of the community. Nonetheless, new research on the concept of "grit" offers promising insight into how prosecutors can weather the storms of tough verdicts while increasing our resilience over time. And, like most good concepts in social psychology, the research on grit confirms much of what we take as common sense and dispels a few destructive myths.

"Grit" is not a new...