He said, if she left, he’d kill her

"Battered women are most likely to be killed when they leave their abuser," Amy Lorenz-Moser says. Photo by Stefan Hester (BA '00, St. Louis)

By taking on controversial parole cases of women who have killed their abusive husbands, Amy Lorenz-Moser ’97 shines a light on the complexities of domestic abuse.

Amy Lorenz-Moser ’97 remembers waiting in line for lunch at Webster’s University Center when she saw a man charge into the room and start hitting one of the food service workers. The woman screamed and fled to the kitchen; he pursued her with white-hot rage. Most students scattered, but Lorenz-Moser stayed calm and used her cell phone to call the police. Security officers intervened, and a few minutes later, police arrived to handcuff the attacker.

Lorenz-Moser approached the victim and offered to serve as a witness, but the woman refused. “She looked at me and said, ‘You don’t know how much worse [his arrest] makes things for me,’ ” Lorenz-Moser recalls. “She was so afraid of this man, and it was hard for me to understand, but I remember wishing that I could have helped her.”

Although Lorenz-Moser never saw the woman again, the incident stayed with her. “People give a lot of lip service to the horrors of domestic violence, but they don’t have to think about it every day,” she says. “That day in the University Center brought this issue to the forefront for me.”

Already planning to study law after graduating from Webster, Lorenz-Moser chose to attend the University of Missouri School of Law in part because of the school’s domestic violence clinic. It wasn’t long before a professor noticed her passion for the subject and tapped her for a new project called the Missouri Battered Women’s Clemency Coalition (MBWCC).

The coalition was designed to assist victims of domestic violence who had been convicted decades ago of killing their abusers. Because of the laws at the time, evidence of domestic violence wasn’t admissible in court, which meant that many of these women received a remarkably harsh sentence—life without the possibility of parole.

In 2000, Lorenz-Moser began working on her first MBWCC case: trying to obtain clemency for Lynda Branch, who had been convicted in 1986 of fatally shooting her abusive husband. Lorenz-Moser spent a year crafting a 150-page petition for then-governor Mel Carnahan, but he died in a plane crash shortly after he received it. It was years before Gov. Bob Holden finally granted the petition, giving Branch life with the possibility of parole. When Branch appeared before the parole board, members denied her bid for parole—an action ultimately reversed by the Missouri Supreme Court.

It took seven years before Branch was set free. By then, Lorenz-Moser had graduated from law school in 2000 and begun working as a products liability lawyer. She spent hundreds of hours working pro bono on the Branch case. Though the case was arduous, it was ultimately rewarding, and Lorenz-Moser was ready to help more women. She accepted the cases of Carlene Borden, who was convicted of shooting her husband, and Vicky Williams, who was convicted of hiring a man to kill her husband.

Lorenz-Moser knows that many people can’t understand why women stay with their abusers. Yet for people who are in abusive relationships, leaving can mean anything but freedom. “Battered women are most likely to be killed when they leave their abuser—while we’re working to obtain an order of protection,” Lorenz-Moser says. “I can’t tell you how many people say, ‘He said if I left, he would kill me.’ ”

Fortunately, laws are evolving to address the complexity of such cases. In the late 1980s, for example, the Missouri state legislature passed a statute recognizing that domestic violence victims are often in fear for their lives even outside the moment they’re being harmed. As a result, killings that didn’t occur in the heat of battle could still be considered self defense. Helped along by the MBWCC, another statute passed in 2007, which opened up parole opportunities for some women who had received harsh sentences for killing their abusive partners or spouses before 1990.

Attitudes need to change next, says Lorenz-Moser. “Prosecutors, police officers, and judges need a better understanding of this issue,” she says. “Maybe prosecutors won’t seek such harsh penalties if they understand how domestic violence affects a situation.”

Because these pro bono cases can be extraordinarily time consuming, Lorenz-Moser is grateful for the support she’s received from her employer, Armstrong Teasdale, where she is partner. She is also thankful for her understanding husband, Michael Moser, who stays home with the couple’s two daughters, ages four and two. “He’s been incredibly supportive,” she says, noting that on occasion he brought their infant daughters to the courtroom so Lorenz-Moser could feed them.

Lorenz-Moser spent three years working on the Borden and Williams cases. Initially, the parole board offered only curt denials for her requests. She sued the board and won another set of hearings, which she attended just a few weeks after her second daughter was born. When the board again denied the requests, she sued for a second time. At the third hearing, on October 15, 2010—more than two years after the first hearing—both women were set free.

Lorenz-Moser wasn’t the only one to feel that justice finally had been served. When Borden left prison, a group of more than two dozen staff members and guards lined up to applaud as she walked across the yard and through the gate. Williams, who was released from a different prison, says that she also received a positive reaction from the prison staff.

“It’s amazing now to see these women out there living their lives,” Lorenz-Moser says of Branch, Borden, and Williams. “It’s a challenging economy, but they’re all working. I told each of them when they were released that I’ve never been so happy in my life to lose a client.”

Mary Beck, professor of clinical law at the University of Missouri and one of Lorenz-Moser’s law school instructors, believes that Lorenz-Moser’s tenacity is the driving force that ultimately won these three women their freedom. “Amy is indefatigable,” she says. “She’s incredibly determined, resourceful, and creative.”

Those traits, combined with her most recent successes, have earned accolades for Lorenz-Moser from her colleagues and the media. In January she was named Missouri Lawyers Weekly 2010 Lawyer of the Year.

But as you might expect, Lorenz-Moser isn’t about to rest on her laurels. She’s already on to her next case, working with Tanya Mitchell, who is serving a 15-year sentence after killing her abusive husband in 2001. “Two weeks after I found out about the parole decision for Vicky and Carlene, I took this case,” she says.

Lorenz-Moser can’t change what happened to the woman who was attacked behind the lunch line. But she can—and will— continue to make a difference in the lives of other battered women who need her help.

By Erin Peterson

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