Case Explained: Survivors’ Justice Is Accountability That Reflects Reality – Legal Perspective

Michigan knows the toll of interpersonal violence. In 2024, law enforcement agencies across the state recorded more than 68,000 incidents of domestic violence producing over 74,000 victims—a figure that has remained stubbornly consistent year after year. State crime data shows that approximately 80 domestic violence-related murders and manslaughters occur in Michigan annually. Also in 2024, the national trafficking hotline identified 340 confirmed cases and 585 victims in the state, ranking it among the top 10 nationally for reported trafficking cases. Meanwhile, more than 23,000 children were confirmed as victims of abuse or neglect in a single recent reporting year, with nearly 70 percent of those victims under age 10.

These numbers tell a story that law enforcement officers and prosecutors encounter every day. But there is a second chapter that the justice system has been slower to confront: What happens when survivors end up on the other side of the courtroom, charged with offenses directly connected to the abuse they endured? A growing number of states have begun to address this problem through survivors-focused legislation, and Michigan should be next.

What Survivors’ Justice Legislation Does

At its core, survivors’ justice legislation allows courts to consider evidence of victimization, such as domestic violence, human trafficking, or child abuse, as a mitigating factor in criminal sentencing when that abuse was a significant contributing factor to the offense. Critically, these laws do not eliminate accountability; they preserve judicial discretion and require defendants to meet evidentiary standards to demonstrate a nexus between the abuse and the offense.

A well-designed survivors’ justice framework also includes procedural safeguards: notice to prosecutors, opportunities for victim input, and judicial gatekeeping to ensure petitions meet basic legal sufficiency. A model Survivor Justice Act adopted by the American Legislative Exchange Council provides a framework with these safeguards built in. States including Georgia, New York, New Jersey, and Oklahoma have enacted versions of this legislation with bipartisan support, each tailored to the state’s legal framework while preserving the core principle that sentencing should account for the full context of a defendant’s experience.

Why Michigan Needs This

The intersection of victimization and incarceration is not abstract in Michigan. Research consistently shows that between 70 and 95 percent of incarcerated women have experienced domestic or sexual violence. Michigan incarcerates women at a rate of 78 per 100,000 residents—higher than nearly every country on the planet. Even more alarming, state-level incarceration trend data shows that the number of women in Michigan’s prisons more than tripled between 1978 and 2017.

Michigan’s domestic violence landscape adds urgency. One in three Michigan families is impacted by domestic violence. In 75 percent of intimate partner homicides in the state, the victim is killed after the relationship has ended or as it is ending—underscoring the extreme danger survivors face when they attempt to leave. Officers responding to these calls understand the fear and desperation involved; however, current sentencing structures often do not allow judges to fully consider how that history of violence shaped a survivor’s actions when those actions cross a legal line.

Human trafficking compounds the problem. Michigan’s geography makes it a significant corridor for both sex and labor trafficking. Traffickers disproportionately target individuals who have already experienced child abuse, neglect, or intimate partner violence, creating a pipeline from victimization to exploitation. Victims coerced into criminal activity by their traffickers—whether prostitution, drug offenses, or financial crimes—are routinely prosecuted for those offenses without any mechanism for the court to consider the coercion that produced them. Survivors’ justice legislation directly addresses this gap by expanding the coercion defense and allowing trafficking survivors to present evidence of their exploitation.

Child abuse is the upstream driver of much of this cycle. Studies show that 30 to 60 percent of domestic violence perpetrators also abuse children in the household, and childhood trauma is one of the strongest predictors of future justice-system involvement. Michigan’s own crime data identifies more than 35,000 children as victims of domestic violence over the past five years—a staggering number that does not even capture the full scope of child maltreatment.

The Public Safety Case

For law enforcement leaders and prosecutors, the case for survivors’ justice legislation is ultimately a public safety argument. Every dollar spent incarcerating someone who does not pose a genuine ongoing threat to the community is a dollar unavailable for investigating violent crime, supporting victims, and closing cases. Research on the women’s incarceration crisis has documented how the justice system frequently fails women—first as victims who do not receive adequate protection, and then as defendants whose histories of victimization are excluded from the courtroom. Traditional criminal justice processes have focused overwhelmingly on men, leaving critical gaps in how the system responds to women whose pathways into crime are rooted in abuse, caregiving pressures, and economic instability.

Data from states that have implemented these laws supports this finding. An analysis of New York’s Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act found that at least 71 people have received reduced sentences since the law went into effect in 2019. In Oklahoma, the first person freed under the Survivors’ Act was a woman who had served 34 years of a life sentence for her role in the death of her abuser. These individuals are not a threat to public safety; in many cases, they are people whose continued incarceration serves no deterrent or rehabilitative purpose but whose release could reunite families, reduce correctional costs, and allow the system to focus resources where they are most needed.

Prosecutors’ practical concerns about frivolous petitions, emotional strain on victims’ families, and the integrity of the process are legitimate and should inform how any Michigan bill is drafted. But these concerns are not insurmountable. Well-designed survivor sentencing laws already address them through sufficient evidentiary standards, judicial gatekeeping, and built-in opportunities for victim input.

Trauma-Informed Is Not Soft on Crime

One of the most persistent misconceptions about survivors’ justice legislation is that it creates a free pass. It does not. What it does do is preserve accountability by enhancing the system’s ability to calibrate it based on the full context of the offense. Decades of clinical research and neuroscience confirm that prolonged exposure to violence alters decision-making, heightens fear responses, and can lead survivors to act in ways that might appear irrational to someone who has never lived under the constant threat of harm. A justice system that ignores this reality is not tougher—it is less accurate.

The bipartisan nature of the survivors’ justice movement reflects this understanding. Oklahoma’s law passed in one of the most conservative states in the country and overcame an initial gubernatorial veto to become law. Georgia’s bill was championed by a Republican sponsor and signed by a Republican governor. Research on pathways that lead women into the justice system has shown that more than two-thirds of justice-involved women have experienced domestic or sexual violence. One state study found that nearly a quarter of women incarcerated for homicide were imprisoned for crimes directly tied to intimate partner violence. These are not ideological exercises; rather, they represent a recognition across the political spectrum that sentencing should be based on the most complete information available.

A Path Forward for Michigan

Michigan has already taken meaningful steps in this direction. For example, the state’s human trafficking commission began operating in 2015 and is still going strong, and its children’s protective services system processes over 100,000 complaints each year. In 2025, state legislators advanced a “justice for survivors” package aimed at extending statutes of limitations and removing institutional protections that shield abusers; unfortunately, the bills have stalled in a House committee after passing the Senate with bipartisan support. Recent research on women’s community supervision and incarceration highlights the urgent need for gender-responsive changes in states where the female jail population has grown as dramatically as Michigan’s—which incarcerated 30 percent more women between 2009 and 2015 even as its male prison population declined. These are all meaningful efforts, but without survivors’ justice sentencing legislation, the state will continue to punish people for the very trauma it has failed to prevent, thereby weakening the communities it aims to protect.

Law enforcement and prosecutors should be at the table as Michigan considers this legislation—not to resist change, but to help shape it. Practitioner input makes these laws stronger. Research on courtroom dynamics and sentencing policy has found that laws written without consideration of how courts actually operate often produce unintended consequences and that the people who implement these changes must be consulted in designing them. Including practitioners ensures that evidentiary standards are workable, that procedural safeguards are robust, and that the system maintains the trust of both survivors and the public. Studies on prosecutorial influence have documented how prosecutors shape the criminal justice system at every stage from charging decisions to sentencing, making their input essential to well-crafted legislation. A collaborative, data-driven approach to updating sentencing and corrections policy that engages law enforcement, prosecutors, and other stakeholders has been adopted in 35 states, which have all seen prison populations decline while crime rates continue to fall. Officers respond to domestic violence calls, interview trafficking victims, and document child abuse. They understand the dynamics of power, coercion, and fear better than almost anyone. That expertise should inform how Michigan builds a sentencing framework that accounts for these realities. 

Data on women in the justice system confirms that women’s share of total arrests has nearly doubled since 1980 and that women—often the same women who later appear as defendants—now account for 48 percent of all violent crime victims. Recognizing the trauma of victimhood does not diminish accountability; instead, it makes accountability more meaningful. When the system gets sentencing right, it strengthens public trust, allocates resources more effectively, and ultimately makes communities safer. Michigan’s survivors deserve a justice system that accounts for their whole stories. It is time for the state to join the growing number of jurisdictions that have recognized this principle in law.