The Murder of Melissa Batten: Please Give, and Help Prevent Domestic Violence

Like half the blog entries of 2008, this story starts with Barack Obama.  I recently got the Fall 2008 issue of the Harvard Law Bulletin, an alumni publication, with the smiling face of Barack Obama ('91) on the cover, whose promise of leadership and excellence was realized so fully and wonderfully in the years after he graduated law school.  Toward the back of the Bulletin is a small-type list of obits.  I read these.  Especially the ones of younger graduates.  And that's how I learned the remarkable and disturbing story of the murder of Melissa Batten, of the class of 1997, shot dead by her husband eight days after she obtained an order of protection.

Missy (the name she went by) was 36 when she was killed.  She had worked at a large law firm in North Carolina after graduation, but then moved to the office of the Mecklenburg County Public Defender from 2000 to 2002, where she the Bulletin tells us, she "handled hundreds of cases and worked in domestic violence court."  This is only one fact.  But it tells you a lot about Missy Batten.  Like Barack Obama, she had a law degree that would enable her to earn a lot of money.  Like Barack Obama before and after graduation, she worked not to maximize her income, but for the public good.  Public defenders are not uniformly saints.  But like all public lawyers, they have made a decision to work for the public good.  And while most members of the public don't know this, public defenders are generally paid less than their prosecutorial counterparts.  They are putting their money where their passion is twice -- by taking a low paying job that serves a public interest, and by taking the job that pays less than prosecution.  The simple fact is that Missy Batten made a choice to use her (monetarily very valuable) time to do something good.  And Missy Batten worked in the area of domestic violence, which of course makes her death even more poignant.

News items don't explain how or why she ended up working later for Microsoft, in Redmond, Washington, as a software developer for the Xbox game Banjo-Kazooie.  She sounded enthusiastic and engaged when interviewed about that work.  It makes me wonder if the work for the indigent burned her out on lawyering, if it was simply a matter of personal style -- her realizing that lawyering was not for her, was less fulfilling that trying to create -- or if it was something else altogether.  Unknown.  But the rest of the story is painful, and has a tragic inexorability, when read after the fact by the living.  Apparently, she had an affair, her husband obtained a gun, and brandished it with the safety off at a restaurant, saying he'd kill himself.  He broke into her workplace on July 16, and was caught and led away by security.  On July 19 and 20, he called her thirty times and ordered her not to hang up.  On July 21, she obtained an order of protection, which was served upon Joseph Batten, ordering him to stay more than 100 yards from her.  On July 29, he confronted her in the parking lot of the Redmond apartments where she had moved, and took her life with eight shots from a 9 mm handgun, before dispatching himself with one.

In parsing through accounts of what happened between the Battens, or to Missy Batten, there isn't a lot of wisdom or detail.  You can learn that the murderer had worked most recently for the maker of Dungeons and Dragons, and had 46 Facebook friends.  You can hear platitudinous journalistic tongue-clucking that the victim was a domestic violence lawyer whose knowledge couldn't save her, who put her faith in a piece of paper that couldn't save her.  I'm sure that Missy Batten was a very, very smart woman who knew that she was acutely at risk, and knew that brains and paper weren't a cure-all.  The most important general wisdom I saw in the many articles about her death was this:  "a special shelter may be the only way to keep a woman...safe.  Unfortunately, because of funding issues, there are more people in danger than there are safe places to house them."

I wrote recently about the importance of bearing witness to suffering around us, especially in this holiday season, especially if we're ok.  Barack Obama's election was personal to me, in part because of my pride in having attended his school, and my agreement with his values.  Missy Batten's death is likewise meaningful to me:  she tried to do good, and tried to create, two deeply important things. 

There are many, many people in danger of domestic violence, and not enough money, or lawyers, or paper, or jails, on the side of keeping them safe.  So I gave today in her name, as Missy's Bulletin obit suggested, to the Eastside Domestic Violence Program (EDVP), working in the Seattle area to protect women in danger.  Unlike Barack, Missy's face isn't on a magazine cover today.  But she tried to make the world a better place, and gave of herself to help others.  Giving to the EDVP, we can do those two things, things that we talked about so much in Campaign 2008.  I hope you choose to give too.