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Early this year, New Jersey became the sixth state to enact a law that lets courts consider past history of abuse as a mitigating factor in sentencing for survivors of domestic violence. Similar laws have passed in New York, Illinois, California, Oklahoma, and Georgia over the past seven years. A bill is pending in Massachusetts, and the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council has published its own version of this law for potential use by other states.
But the popularity of these laws raise a troubling question: Can the same institutions that have historically discredited women’s claims of abuse now fairly decide which survivors are credible enough to deserve a second chance?
Advocacy for survivors’ justice laws emerged in 2009 after decades of research revealed that domestic violence, sexual violence, and coercive control were significant contributing factors in cases of crimes committed by abuse survivors, but were rarely considered by courts at sentencing. Passing the laws was only the first step toward addressing this injustice; whether these laws fulfill their promise depends on the people charged with applying them.
In 2024, I co-founded You Are Not Alone, a nonprofit dedicated to addressing how men understand and respond to violence against women. Through my work, I have spoken to countless abuse survivors, most of them women, seeking resentencing under these laws. One pattern has become almost impossible to ignore: Women can do everything asked of them by the criminal justice system yet still be treated as presumptively not credible.
As of June 2026, the Survivors Justice Project has documented eighty-five reduced sentences under New York’s Domestic Violence Justice Survivors Act, eliminating twenty-one potential life sentences and more than 248 years of unnecessary incarceration. But they exist alongside dozens of denials, many without a hearing. The numbers suggest access to relief remains uneven.
In July 1999, April Wilkens was convicted of killing her former fiancé after enduring years of his abuse. When Oklahoma passed the Survivors Justice Act in 2024, Wilkens became one of its highest-profile applicants for resentencing. Her application ran more than 400 pages, documenting years of abuse. Her attorney, Colleen McCarty, called it “the exact type of case that the Survivors Act was designed for.”
And yet, in September 2025, a judge ruled that Wilkens had not met the burden of proving her abuse was a substantial contributing factor. Lamented McCarty, in a podcast last October, “When you have as much evidence as this, and we’re told it still doesn’t count, it does not look good for the rest of the cases moving forward.”
Advocates argued that the court interpreted the law far more narrowly than legislators intended. Today, Wilkens’s case has become a leading example cited by advocates arguing that survivors justice legislation is only the first step. Whether those laws ultimately fulfill their promise depends largely on how judges interpret trauma, credibility, and the lived realities of abuse survivors.
For decades, psychologists and legal scholars Deborah Epstein and Lisa Goodman have studied why female survivors are often disbelieved. People unconsciously compare survivors to an imaginary “perfect victim”—and if a survivor’s behavior differs from that ideal, even in ways that trauma experts recognize as normal, her credibility is often called into question.
Legislatures enacted survivors laws because they recognized abuse and trauma had long been discounted at sentencing. But if decision-makers continue relying on the same credibility stereotypes identified by Epstein and Goodman, those assumptions will inevitably shape who gets relief and who doesn’t.
Critics argue that judges are merely applying the legal standard the legislature enacted, and that many petitions fail because applicants cannot prove their abuse substantially contributed to their crime. But that assumes judges evaluate credibility free from the same cultural biases that shape society, even though decades of research suggest those assumptions about how real survivors should behave remain deeply embedded within our institutions.
Survivors’ justice laws were never intended to guarantee resentencing. They were intended to ensure the weight of one’s abuse was given meaningful consideration. Whether they succeed may depend less on the language of the laws themselves than on whether the institutions enforcing them are willing to recognize survivors without demanding they first become the impossible “perfect victim.”
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.