New Pennsylvania Law Seeks to Aid Abuse Survivors Who Resist — But Is It Enough?

Pennsylvania State Sen. Amanda Capalletti recently announced her intention to propose legislation that would allow people convicted of crimes related to resisting their own abuse to ask for shorter sentences. The legislation also enables those already serving long sentences for crimes substantially related to their experiences of violence to seek resentencing.

The law is meant to offer hope to people who are facing long sentences for crimes related to their victimization: women who kill their abusers, for instance, or victims of sex trafficking who harm the people who have trafficked them. These people are often referred to as criminalized survivors, recognizing their dual status as victims and defendants. Similar laws have already been passed in California, Illinois, New York, Georgia, and Oklahoma and proposed in several other states.

As a Maryland-based attorney who represents criminalized survivors of violence, I’m a pragmatist — I’ll use any tool available to try to free my clients from the trauma, violence, and deprivation that are the hallmarks of the American prison system. And as an advocate, I’ve worked with others to get these laws passed. Such legislation is a step toward ensuring that survivors of violence are not doubly punished — first by their partners or abusers, then by the criminal legal system.

But we need to be realistic about what these laws accomplish. As I show in my book Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Power of Abolition Feminism, victims of violence who fail to conform to the narrow stereotypes of “acceptable” victimization do not benefit from such legislation. Survivors who are not white, heterosexual, meek, weak, passive, perfect victims are more likely to see their claims about experiencing violence dismissed — and to have judges refuse to credit them in sentencing.

What’s more, even when these laws are applied, survivors are still punished for acting under coercion or duress or to save their lives — they’re just punished for less time. They lose time with their children and families. They are branded criminals after years of victimization. They are subjected to the trauma of imprisonment, revictimized through invasive strip searches and surveillance, subjected to physical and sexual abuse, and denied fresh food, clean air, and adequate medical care. They also experience the lingering consequences of criminalization post-release, including difficulty finding housing and work, draconian conditions of probation and parole, and ineligibility for government programs.

That’s why laws like the one being proposed in Pennsylvania will not be the route to justice for criminalized survivors. But abolition feminism — a feminism that opposes use of the state’s power to punish — can offer a different way forward.

Take, for example, the case of Nikki Addimando. In 2019, Addimando sought relief under New York’s then-new Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act (DVSJA) after shooting and killing her partner, Christopher Grover, who had physically and sexually abused her for years. Addimando, described in a documentary about the law’s passage as “the freaking poster child” for the legislation, was well-known to police, medical professionals, victim services agencies, and child protective services in and around Dutchess County, New York, all of whom had records documenting her abuse.

But prosecutor Chana Krauss argued that Addimando’s injuries could have resulted from sexual encounters with people other than her partner. Her clear message to the jury was that a slut isn’t a victim. The jury found Addimando guilty of second-degree murder, and the judge in the case declined to apply the DVSJA to reduce her sentence of 19 years to life. At her sentencing, Addimando told the court, “This is why women don’t leave … So often we end up dead or where I’m standing, alive but still not free.” A little over a year later, an appellate court reduced Addimando’s sentence under the state’s law and resentenced her to 7.5 years in prison — which meant serving an additional 3 years before she was released.

Similarly, in Oklahoma in 1999, April Wilkens, who killed her partner after years of abuse documented through police reports, protective orders, and hospital records, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. In 2024, after 27 years in prison, Wilkens was the first person to seek resentencing under the newly enacted Oklahoma Survivors Act. But prosecutors argued that her methamphetamine use and mental illness — not the abuse she was subjected to — motivated the shooting. In September 2025, Judge David Guten denied her resentencing, stating that he believed Wilkens was a victim of abuse but that she had not proved that the abuse was a substantial contributing factor to the crime. Wilkens remains in prison, her substance use and mental health issues having been used to undercut her claims of victimization.

These examples highlight the shortcomings of laws like the one now being proposed in Pennsylvania. Survivor justice acts are important but limited tools. They don’t always provide relief to those who deserve it because they require judges to use their discretion to benefit survivors. But discretion is what enables judges to rely on victim stereotypes to minimize or reject the evidence of victimization presented by criminalized survivors. Even when the laws ultimately “work,” as in the case of Nikki Addimando, that can still mean that a survivor of violence serves a lengthy prison sentence, adding injury to injury. And once a state has passed a survivors justice act, there is a risk that its lawmakers and citizens will believe the problem of criminalizing survival has been solved, while imperfect victims remain trapped in the criminal legal system.

There is a better, albeit more radical, way forward: abolition feminism. Simply put, abolition feminism is the only politics and practice that can prevent punishment of survivors. It means defunding the structures (police, prosecutors, prisons) that drive the punishment of survivors and dedicating that funding to services, programs, and people to prevent harm and ensure that people’s basic human needs are meant. It also means decoupling the idea of justice from punishment and finding alternative ways to hold people accountable for harm. As the prominent abolitionist Mariame Kaba frequently says, “Prisons are not feminist.”

On the way to complete abolition, there are concrete things that we can do now to mitigate the harms of the criminal system, like opposing the building of new prisons, advocating to end the long mandatory sentences that entrap so many survivors, and engaging communities in survivor defense work on behalf of criminalized survivors.

I will continue to work to help pass survivor justice acts. If Maryland ever enacts one, I’ll use it to the best of my ability to assist the criminalized survivors we represent. But survivor justice acts are short-term and imperfect solutions to the problem of the criminalization of survival. As long as the prison system exists, there will be criminalized survivors. The only way to ensure that criminalized survivors are not punished by the criminal legal system is to eliminate that system.