The story begins on a fall day at lunchtime. An undergrad, Amy Lorenz, is in Webster University’s cafeteria, and a woman whose name we don’t know is working the line for chicken strips.
Like many undergrads, Amy’s life is just coming into focus. She was an opera major but has switched to political science, because she thinks she wants to be a lawyer. She’s not particularly sure why.
Amy comes from a Sicilian family where opinions rain down loud and plentiful. When she was a baby, she cried at bedtime, banged her head against the crib or held her breath until her mom came and picked her up. When she was in the seventh grade, she led a student walkout to protest a middle-school injustice suffered by one of her friends.
There’s another person in the beginning of this story. A man. Like the woman, we don’t know his name. He has just come into the cafeteria, and he is angry.
Yelling, he hits at the woman working the chicken-strips line.
And because Amy’s the type of person to take action, either by holding her breath or leading a walkout, she calls the police.
When the police come, Amy offers to be a witness. But the woman doesn’t want a witness. She is terrified. She begs the police to let the man go. She knows a witness, the arrest, all of it, will make things worse for her.
“The situation was so complex that you could never really understand it,” Amy says, remembering that day in the mid-1990s.
One thing was clear: Amy knew exactly why she was going to law school.
We’re still in the 1990s, the summer of 1997, and a man named Joe Church is searching for an old classmate at his Mercy High School reunion in St. Louis. He asks a friend where she is.
Prison. For killing her husband.
Now, Joe is a financial planner for Merrill Lynch and not your run-of-the-mill activist. But he’s always had a soft spot for women, especially his mom, mother-in-law and three sisters.
“I’ve always had a hard time imagining how somebody goes home and gets beat up,” he says. “And beaten by someone you know you’re not going to overpower.”
He asks for the name of the prison. Then he calls.
While Amy is in the cafeteria and Joe is searching for his high school classmate, two women, Carlene Borden and Vicky Williams, are sitting in prison in Vanda-lia.
They’ve been here a long time, most of their adult lives.
Carlene and Vicky have this in common: They’ve both been convicted of killing their husbands.
They don’t know it yet, but they also have this in common: Amy.
At the end of their stories, there will be Christmas and birds and interviews and suits. Carlene will say Amy is her angel and her best friend. Vicky will say Amy gave her back her life. They’ll both say they’re glad Amy was on their side and not the other. But that’s all a ways off.
Back to Amy. Because as much as this story is about women, and domestic violence and redemption, it’s mainly about her. Today, she lives in Des Peres, a west St. Louis County suburb perhaps best known for its mall with a giant, illuminated white dove that drivers can see from Highway 270.
Amy now has another last name — Moser — and two girls, 4 and 1. The older one goes to preschool, where she’s learning to dance. The younger one emulates the dance moves, twirling and twirling around and around like a toddler prima donna until she falls down. The little girls’ names are Olivia and Siena, and Dad stays home with them during the day.
“There’s so much pink in this house,” he says, “it’s unbelievable.”
Dad’s name is Michael — Mike. He never imagined he’d stay home raising kids, but then his friends always have said, “Mike, you like things just a little bit dif-ferent.” He left his full-time advertising job in 2006, before the economy tanked. It wasn’t so much prescience as a decision for himself and the family. He was ready to step out of the rat race. He loves the girls. He loves Amy.
They met at a bonfire in Columbia when she was in law school at the University of Missouri and he was working in the St. Louis ad business. She was pretty and bright, and Mike knew he would never be bored with her. They honeymooned in Italy. It was the best trip of his life.
More family: Both of Amy’s parents are musicians and entrepreneurs. No one in the family was a lawyer when Amy decided on law school and her brother fol-lowed suit.
“Of course I should have known that,” says Amy’s mom, Phyllis. “They argued very tactfully throughout their childhood with me and with each other.”
Amy’s parents taught Amy that corporations aren’t faceless. And today, Amy is a big-shot product liability attorney for Armstrong Teasdale.
When she comes home at night, the girls rock the house with “Mommy!!!” and Amy feels like a hero.
Back before the bonfire and honeymoon and pink spilling out all over, Amy, who never forgot the woman whose name we don’t know, found Professor Mary Beck. Professor Beck is soft-spoken and extraordinarily articulate, with kind eyes and bobbed, dusty blond hair. She is a registered nurse and a lawyer, and her life’s work is the Family Violence Clinic at the University of Missouri School of Law.
Amy came to MU because of the clinic. She met Professor Beck after Joe Church made his phone call. Actually, after he made many, many phone calls, 15 mi-nutes here, 20 minutes there, for months. The phone calls led to conversations that culminated in a project called the Missouri Battered Women’s Clemency Coali-tion, made up of individuals from the state’s four law schools.
Like the hardest goals tend to be, the coalition’s was simple: Obtain clemency for 11 women imprisoned in Missouri for killing their husbands. The women had been identified as victims of domestic abuse, but that wasn’t a defense at the time of their trials.
Such abuse looks like this: A toe, broken open by pliers. Whip marks from a belt. Two identical black eyes. Sexual torture. A threat to kill a mother, a child, a dog.
All of the women on the list had been convicted and sentenced to life, without the possibility of parole. Their cases were, all of them, Hail Mary shots.
“There is absolutely no blueprint to write a clemency petition,” Professor Beck says. Each petition is different, because every case is different, and the statute governing petitions does not set out a format for them.
But then, who better to take a Hail Mary shot than bright-eyed law students? Students such as Amy, who now says, “I never let my need to know something about the law slow me down.”
And so the cases were divvied up, and the students — none of whom had any idea how hard all this would be — got to work.
The steps to getting a battered woman who killed her husband out of prison might begin something like this. At least, this is how they began for Amy:
First, write a 150-page clemency petition to Gov. Mel Carnahan, who will die in a plane crash weeks after it hits his desk. Second, wait four years for it to be-come politically advantageous for another governor to consider clemency. Third, wait again, this time as the woman’s case runs up the state’s court system. Eventually, Lynda Branch gets a 2007 parole date, after the Missouri Supreme Court mandates a new hearing from the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole and says the board cannot consider the seriousness of Branch’s offense in its decision.
In the meantime, Missouri Revised Statute 217.692 churns its way through the legislative process.
A word on the statute: Amy didn’t write it. She’d want you to know that. Other coalition members did. What the statute did when it finally passed in 2007 is basi-cally this: Give individuals who have no prior felony convictions, who were tried for spousal homicide before December 1990 and who are serving 50-year or life sentences the eligibility of parole.
There are more than 600 words in the statute. But it meant just one for Carlene Borden and Vicky Williams, still sitting in Vandalia: hope.
Well, maybe not at first. Hope is a tricky thing in prison.
“Do I really want to talk to them?” Vicky asks her caseworker when she first learns the coalition is taking her case. “Because I don’t know what game this is trying to be.”
Amy put in about 250 hours of pro bono work in 2009 on the two women’s cases and another 250 in 2010. Overall, she has put in more than 1,000 hours, easy, carrying the women and their cases from law firm to law firm, telling each new employer about “this little thing that I do on the side.” Everyone has been under-standing, but Armstrong Teasdale has been “wonderful.”
Besides the common thread of thinking in terms of defense, few similarities exist between Amy’s pro bono and product liability work. But she has never done one without the other. One is good work that pays the bills, and the other “is something you do because you absolutely love it.”
This is love: More than 1,000 pro bono hours, two writs of mandamus, six parole hearings.
After the first hearings, the board issues identical two-sentence denials. Amy sues the board and goes to court a few weeks after delivering her second daughter via C-section, because when somebody’s waiting in prison, you don’t move the court date. Mike brings the girls, so Amy can breastfeed before and after in the car.
When they arrive, Lynda, for whom Amy wrote the clemency petition, is unexpectedly there for support — and proof of what is possible.
The judge “gets it” and vacates the board’s decision, determining the board hadn’t included enough information in its denials to even address whether or not it could deny the women’s paroles.
One year and two more parole hearings later, the board delivers more elaborate denials.
Carlene and Vicky ask Amy to call their children. Amy thinks of the room Vicky’s daughter has already readied for her return. She calls, and it is the hardest thing she has ever done.
Amy fears the women will die in prison. She keeps the thought to herself.
“You’re never going to win unless you put that out of your mind and charge.”
Amy can’t find another case besides Lynda’s that has thrown out a parole board’s decision, and she doesn’t know if she will win. That’s the thing about a Hail Mary shot. You don’t take it because you know. You take it because there’s no other way.
And so Amy sues the board again.
In the order she writes, which is entered by Judge Patricia Joyce, she calls on R.S.Mo. 217.692. She says the parole board must only determine whether there is a “strong and reasonable probability” that the women will offend after being released.
“Reconsideration of the seriousness of the offense by the Parole Board would vitiate the basis of the statute and obstruct the legislative purpose of the statute.”
She calls on the five or six ways the board had violated the previous one- or two-page court order.
She calls on the case of Lynda Branch and another coalition woman, Shirley Lute, paroled in 2007 at age 76.
She promises herself that she and Carlene and Vicky are “just going to come back” if the board again denies parole.
When the board issues its third decision, Professor Beck calls Amy on her way to work. She heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody who heard it from one of the women’s kids.
Because this time, the women called their children themselves. Carlene is 66 years old. Vicky is 55. Each has been in prison more than 30 years, and they’re coming home. On a warm October day in 2010, they do.
A story ends in Armstrong Teasdale’s offices in the Centene Building in Clayton. A conference room full of light. A view. Amy in pearls, Vicky in a suit, her daughter and Professor Beck and her kind eyes in the conference room, in the light. Talking, laughing.
A story also ends in Houston, Mo., down deep in Missouri’s beautiful Ozark country. On Christmas, Carlene’s first at home in 32 years, there is snow on the ground, and she sits and watches the cardinals.
“It was beautiful,” she says. “It was like a picture.”
Ultimately, all the coalition’s women, including Joe Church’s classmate, Shelley Hendrickson, will be released or obtain a release date.
In a letter nominating Amy Lorenz-Moser for a Missouri Lawyers Weekly award commemorating her work, he will write that she and the coalition “have changed the landscape nationwide for the defense of battered women and the clemency efforts on their behalf.”
But a changed legal landscape doesn’t mean Amy’s story is over. In what comes as a surprise to no one, she has taken a new case.
She and Professor Beck will tell you the cases are a result of societal issues that haven’t changed much over the last 30 years: A tendency to blame the victim, an attitude that domestic violence is a personal — not a societal — problem in a society where 1 in 4 women will experience domestic violence.
Laws like R.S.Mo. 217.692 have helped. Acknowledgment of battered spouse syndrome has helped. But at the end of the day, every day, women whose names we don’t know face situations that are impossible for anyone to understand. Situations simultaneously personal and societal, breaking and breakable.
And at the center, if they are lucky, they find an angel.
