CT Survivors Justice Act: Sentencing Reform for Abuse Victims
Connecticut's House Bill 5306 would allow judges to reduce sentences for domestic violence and trafficking survivors whose abuse contributed to their offense.
Sadie Goldman spent 11 years in prison for killing the man who broke her ribs, burned her skin, and told her no one would believe her if she screamed. Connecticut’s courts knew what she endured. They sentenced her anyway, without any legal obligation to weigh what had been done to her against what she had done.
That gap in the law is what House Bill 5306, the Survivors Justice Act, is designed to close.
On March 10, the Judiciary Committee of the Connecticut General Assembly heard testimony on the bill, which would allow judges to reduce sentences for survivors of domestic violence, human trafficking, and sexual assault when the abuse they experienced was a direct contributing factor to their offense. The proposal does not eliminate consequences. It requires courts to consider them.
The distinction matters. Connecticut’s current sentencing framework was built around a model of stranger violence, two people of roughly equal power meeting in a single confrontation. A 2022 University of Michigan Law Review article titled “Sentencing Survivors” found that self-defense law across the United States has never accurately captured the reality of people who act out of survival after sustained, prolonged abuse. The law imagines a fair fight. Domestic violence is the opposite of that.
A 2023 resource from the Delaware Coalition Against Domestic Violence describes the mechanics clearly: abusers use cycles of isolation, financial control, threats, intimidation, and physical harm specifically designed to eliminate a victim’s sense of agency and make leaving feel more dangerous than staying. This is not advocacy language dressing up a contested claim. Courts in multiple states have already accepted this framework as a basis for sentencing reform. Connecticut has not.
Research from the New York State Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence adds another layer. The period immediately after leaving an abusive relationship is statistically the most dangerous moment a survivor faces. That is when they are most likely to be killed. People navigating that reality are not choosing freely from a menu of safe options. They are making desperate calculations inside a closed system where exits have been blocked, weaponized, or both.
For some survivors, that system eventually produces a single perceived way out, one that ends with them in a courtroom. The crime is real. The harm caused is real. But neither exists without what came before it, and a sentencing process that refuses to examine what came before is not delivering justice. It is delivering a second punishment.
The stakes of getting this wrong extend beyond any individual sentence. When courts refuse to account for abuse, they send a signal to every victim still inside a dangerous relationship. That signal says the legal system was not designed with them in mind, and that if their circumstances ever lead to a courtroom, those circumstances will not count. For a person already convinced by their abuser that no one will believe them, that message does real damage.
House Bill 5306 does not ask courts to excuse violence. It asks them to understand context. Judges would retain discretion. They would simply be required to hear the full picture before they decide how many years a person loses.
Connecticut has a habit of thinking of itself as a progressive state on criminal justice while leaving specific, fixable problems unaddressed. This is one of them. The Judiciary Committee heard the testimony in March. The legislature now has to decide whether to move the bill forward or let another session pass without answering the question Sadie Goldman’s case makes unavoidable: what kind of justice system looks at a woman, knows what she survived, and still refuses to let that survival count?
The answer Connecticut gives will say something about who the law thinks it is for.