A free national technical assistance center exists because defense teams routinely do not know how to litigate abuse history. Michigan gives them less statutory material to work with than a growing number of states, its highest court left the central evidentiary question open in 1995, and its stalking statute describes the person being followed and the person following in exactly the same words.
A criminalized survivor is a person who experienced domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, or trafficking, and who is then charged with a crime connected to that abuse. The National Defense Center for Criminalized Survivors, a project of the Battered Women’s Justice Project and formerly the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women, provides free case-specific technical assistance to defense teams handling those cases nationwide. It does not represent anyone.
The existence of that center is the finding. A national help desk staffed for defense attorneys means the expertise is not resident in the defense bar. In Michigan the problem compounds, because the state has no statute directing courts to weigh documented victimization at sentencing, no resentencing mechanism for incarcerated survivors, and a Supreme Court decision that approved expert testimony on battering when the prosecution offers it while expressly declining to resolve whether a defendant may offer the same thing.
Stalking is the category where the machinery is most exposed. Michigan defines the offense by behavior rather than by role, and the protective order system it feeds runs on free filings, statewide venue, no jury, and a rule permitting a private party’s retained attorney to prosecute a criminal contempt carrying jail time.
What is a criminalized survivor?
A person who experienced abuse and is then charged with a crime connected to that experience. The four recurring categories are defensive force, coerced criminal activity, failure-to-protect charges, and custodial interference charges filed after a parent leaves with a child.
Does the National Defense Center take cases?
No. It provides free technical assistance to defense teams, helps locate qualified expert witnesses, supplies case law and sample litigation materials, and works at any stage from pretrial through appeal. It does not enter appearances.
Does Michigan have a survivor justice law?
No. As of August 25, 2026 there is no Michigan statute making documented victimization a defined mitigating factor at sentencing, and no resentencing pathway for people already incarcerated.
How does a stalking victim end up as the defendant?
Michigan’s stalking statute is written in behavioral terms that apply to whoever is named. Documenting a stalker, checking whether they are present, warning third parties, or publishing about them can each map onto the statute’s list of unconsented contact. The defense lives entirely in the carve-out for constitutionally protected activity and conduct serving a legitimate purpose.
What is the exposure in a PPO contempt case?
Up to 93 days in jail and a $500 fine for criminal contempt under MCR 3.708(H)(5)(a). There is no right to a jury. The respondent is entitled to a lawyer, and to appointed counsel at public expense if the court determines it might impose jail and the respondent cannot afford one.
Can a Michigan defendant put on an expert about abuse?
The Court of Appeals allowed it in People v Wilson in 1992. The Supreme Court in People v Christel in 1995 addressed only the prosecution’s use and reserved the defense question. Trial courts are working from an appellate record that never squarely answered it.
What the Center Actually Does, and What Its Existence Proves
The National Defense Center for Criminalized Survivors is a program of the Battered Women’s Justice Project, headquartered in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Before its renaming it operated for decades as the National Clearinghouse for the Defense of Battered Women. It works on cases in every state. Consultation is free.
Its published description of its own function is unusually precise about scope. It identifies defense strategies, supplies relevant case law and sample litigation materials, locates qualified expert witnesses, and helps assemble support networks for people facing trial or working through an appeal. It also takes collect calls from incarcerated survivors. What it will not do is appear in court on anyone’s behalf.
That combination is worth sitting with. A national organization has determined that the highest-leverage intervention available to it is not representation but the technical education of the lawyer who already has the case. Organizations do not build help desks for problems that are being handled well.
The center’s own intake materials tell defendants to hand a printed page to their attorney. That is an organization designing around a known failure mode: the attorney does not know the resource exists, and the client is the only person in the room with an incentive to close that gap.
The center also states plainly what many advocacy organizations will not, which is that raising a defendant’s abuse history is not always useful, advisable, or permissible, and that whether to do it is the defense attorney’s call. That sentence is doing real work. Abuse history introduced badly can hand the prosecution a motive theory. It can open the door to the defendant’s own prior conduct. It can produce an expert who gets excluded and a jury that now suspects the defense went looking for an excuse.
The technical assistance model exists because the risk of doing this wrong is not theoretical. It is the ordinary outcome when a generalist criminal defense practice encounters a case type it sees once every several years.
Michigan’s Self-Defense Statute Measures the Wrong Interval
Michigan codified self-defense in 2006 through Public Act 309, now MCL 780.971 through 780.974. Under MCL 780.972, a person not engaged in the commission of a crime may use deadly force anywhere they have a legal right to be, with no duty to retreat, if they honestly and reasonably believe the force is necessary to prevent imminent death, imminent great bodily harm, or imminent sexual assault. MCL 780.951 supplies a rebuttable presumption of honest and reasonable belief in home invasion situations. MCL 780.973 preserves the common law of self-defense where the act does not reach.
Read as written, the statute is generous. It removes the retreat requirement. It extends beyond the dwelling. It applies to defense of another. On its face there is nothing hostile to a survivor in it.
The problem is the unit of measurement. Imminence is an instantaneous standard. It asks what a reasonable person would have believed about the next few seconds. The danger assessment a person under sustained coercive control is actually running is longitudinal. It is built from escalation patterns, from what happened the last four times a certain look preceded a certain act, from strangulation history, from what the abuser said would happen if the person left, and from the documented reality that the period around separation is when intimate partner homicide is most likely to occur.
A jury instructed on imminence is instructed to ignore most of that unless something makes it admissible. The two statutory conditions compound the problem. The person must not be engaged in the commission of a crime at the time, which is a live exclusion for survivors coerced into criminal activity by the same person they are defending against. And the person must have a legal right to be where they are, which becomes contested in cases involving contested residences, protective order boundaries, and disputed tenancies.
The statute asks what the person believed in the moment. The survivor’s evidence is about the pattern. Getting the pattern in front of the jury is the entire defense, and Michigan has never settled whether it comes in.
The Christel Asymmetry
In 1992 the Michigan Court of Appeals decided People v Wilson, 194 Mich App 599, holding that expert testimony on battering was admissible where domestic violence was a factor in the offense. The defendant in that case had shot her husband while he slept.
Three years later the Michigan Supreme Court decided People v Christel, 449 Mich 578. The posture matters. Christel was not a survivor-defendant case. The defendant was charged with criminal sexual conduct, the complainant was the person who had been abused, and the prosecution offered expert testimony to help the jury understand why she had delayed reporting and recanted. The Court held that such testimony is admissible when it is relevant and helpful to evaluating a complainant’s credibility and the expert is properly qualified. It also drew a firm line on scope, holding that the expert may explain the general characteristics of the pattern but “the expert cannot opine that the complainant was a battered woman.”
Then it stopped. The Court expressly refrained from approving or disapproving the use of that evidence when a criminal defendant offers it as exculpatory. In 2020 the Court of Appeals in People v Spaulding, 332 Mich App 638, adopted the broader term battered partner syndrome and reiterated that expert testimony is confined to generalities without opining on the facts of the case.
The resulting structure is asymmetric in a way that is easy to state and hard to justify. When the abused person is the state’s witness, the Michigan Supreme Court has told trial courts how to admit expert testimony explaining her behavior. When the abused person is the defendant, the highest court in the state has said nothing binding, and the trial judge is working from an unreviewed Court of Appeals decision from 1992 and a reservation of the question from 1995.
This is not a finding that Michigan bars survivor-defendant expert testimony. Wilson remains on the books and trial courts admit this evidence. The finding is narrower and more useful: the question has been open at the Michigan Supreme Court for thirty-one years, which means admissibility varies by courtroom, and a defense attorney litigating it is litigating without a controlling answer. That uncertainty is precisely what free technical assistance is for.
Stalking Is the Category Where the Statute Describes Both People
The National Defense Center names four populations it serves: victims of domestic and dating violence, sexual assault, stalking, and human trafficking who have been criminalized as a result of being abused. Stalking is the least discussed of the four and the one whose criminalization mechanism is structurally distinct.
The other three categories criminalize a discrete act. Defensive force is an act. A coerced offense is an act. A failure-to-protect charge is an omission treated as one. Stalking is different. It criminalizes a pattern, and Michigan’s definition of that pattern is written in behavioral terms that carry no information about who is frightened of whom.
Under MCL 750.411h, a course of conduct is a pattern composed of two or more separate noncontinuous acts evidencing a continuity of purpose. Harassment is repeated or continuing unconsented contact that would cause a reasonable individual emotional distress and that actually causes it. Unconsented contact is enumerated and the list is expansive: following or appearing within sight of the individual, approaching or confronting them in public or on private property, appearing at their workplace or residence, entering or remaining on their property, contacting them by telephone or mail or electronic means, and placing or delivering an object on their property. Aggravated stalking under MCL 750.411i adds a violation of a restraining order, a credible threat, or a prior conviction, and moves the offense to a felony.
Now consider what a person being stalked actually does. They photograph the vehicle that keeps appearing. They drive past to confirm whether someone is there. They contact an employer, a landlord, or a family member to warn them. They keep a log, which requires observation. Sometimes they publish, because after enough unanswered police reports, publication is the only remaining deterrent. Every one of those behaviors appears somewhere on the statutory list.
The statute cannot tell the two people apart on conduct alone. The entire distinction rests on one clause: harassment does not include constitutionally protected activity or conduct that serves a legitimate purpose. That clause is the whole defense, and it is decided by a judge weighing facts, not by any element the prosecution must prove first.
The statute also builds in a presumption that runs toward whoever is named as the actor. Under MCL 750.411h(4), evidence that a person continued a course of unconsented contact after being asked to stop gives rise to a rebuttable presumption that the continuation caused the victim to feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, harassed, or molested. That presumption is indifferent to which party started it. A survivor who keeps documenting after being told to stop documenting has, on the face of the statute, produced the predicate.
The protective order channel
The civil side is where most of this actually plays out. Michigan issues stalking personal protection orders under MCL 600.2950a, distinct from the domestic relationship orders under MCL 600.2950. The procedural design is deliberately frictionless, which is correct for the people it was built for and consequential when it is used the other way.
There is no filing fee and no summons issues, under MCR 3.703(A). Venue is unrestricted: where the respondent is an adult, a petition may be filed in any county in Michigan regardless of residency, under MCR 3.703(E)(1). The court must rule on an ex parte request within 24 hours, and an ex parte order is valid for not less than 182 days. Failure to serve the order does not affect its validity or effectiveness.
MCR 3.706(B) prohibits mutual orders. That prohibition is narrower than it sounds. It bars a single order restraining both parties. It does not bar cross-petitions, and two petitions filed separately produce two separate orders with two separate case numbers, each fully enforceable, each carrying its own contempt exposure. Whether that pattern is common in Michigan is not publicly measured, which is itself a gap worth naming.
Contempt for violating a PPO carries up to 93 days in jail and a $500 fine under MCR 3.708(H)(5)(a). There is no right to a jury trial under MCR 3.708(H)(1). And under MCR 3.708(G), the prosecuting attorney prosecutes the criminal contempt unless the petitioner retains their own attorney for it. A private party’s retained counsel can therefore prosecute a proceeding that ends in jail, before a judge sitting as sole factfinder, in a case that cost nothing to open and could be opened in any county in the state.
Two features of that arrangement deserve to be stated plainly rather than left as procedure. The first is that criminal contempt in this posture carries most of the consequences of a misdemeanor prosecution without the jury that ordinarily accompanies jail exposure. The second is that the charging discretion which normally sits with an elected prosecutor, who can decline, can pass to a private litigant who has no obligation to decline anything.
The rules do supply a counterweight, and it is underused. Under MCR 3.708(D)(3) and (4), at the respondent’s first appearance the court must advise them of the right to a lawyer’s assistance at the hearing and, if the court determines it might impose jail, that a lawyer will be appointed at public expense if the respondent wants one and cannot afford one. The court must then appoint one if requested and appropriate. A respondent who does not ask, or who is not clearly advised, proceeds without counsel into a proceeding where the rules of evidence apply and the standard is proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Appointed counsel is the load-bearing element. The National Defense Center provides technical assistance to defense teams and does not represent anyone, which means its expertise reaches a criminalized stalking survivor only through a lawyer. In a PPO contempt case the right to that lawyer already exists in the court rule. The gap is not the absence of a right. It is the distance between the rule and the person standing at the podium who does not know to invoke it.
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$10/month ?Where Michigan Sits in the Statutory Wave
Survivor justice legislation does something narrower than popular framing suggests. It does not create an excuse or an acquittal pathway. It permits a court to treat documented victimization as a mitigating factor at sentencing when the abuse was a significant contributing factor to the offense, and it requires the defendant to prove that nexus. Judicial discretion is preserved. Evidentiary standards apply.
The Court of Appeals holds expert testimony on battering admissible where domestic violence was a factor in the commission of the offense. The defendant had shot her husband while he slept, a fact pattern that cannot be reconciled with a strict reading of imminence without evidence about the pattern.
The Court holds expert testimony on battering admissible when relevant and helpful to a jury’s evaluation of a complainant’s credibility, with the expert confined to general characteristics. The abused person in Christel was the state’s witness, not the defendant.
MCL 780.971 through 780.974 remove the duty to retreat anywhere a person has a legal right to be and condition deadly force on an honest and reasonable belief in imminent death, great bodily harm, or sexual assault. MCL 780.951 adds a rebuttable presumption for home invasion.
New York’s Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act amends Penal Law 60.12 to permit alternative sentences and creates Criminal Procedure Law 440.47, a resentencing pathway for people already incarcerated on terms of eight years or more. Relief requires a proven nexus between the abuse and the offense.
Oklahoma enacts the Survivors’ Act in 2024 over a gubernatorial veto. Georgia’s Survivor Justice Act is signed in May 2025 and takes effect July 1, 2025. New Jersey’s is signed in January 2026. The American Legislative Exchange Council adopts a model Survivor Justice Act in January 2026.
A five-bill trafficking package would expand the criminal convictions that may be set aside on grounds of trafficking victimization, broaden juvenile expungement, and strengthen protections for minors. The House Judiciary Committee took testimony on January 21, 2026, including written support from the Attorney General’s office.
Michigan has a human trafficking commission operating since 2015 and a partial expungement framework for trafficking victimization. It has no statute directing courts to weigh documented abuse as a defined mitigating factor at sentencing, and no vehicle for a person already incarcerated to raise it.
The Population Nobody Is Counting
The research on how many incarcerated people are criminalized survivors is thin, and that thinness is itself the point. What exists is consistent. The Council on Criminal Justice has reported that between half and three-quarters of incarcerated women report experiencing sexual violence, and that more than seventy percent report intimate partner violence. Research compiled by survivor justice advocates puts the range of incarcerated women with a history of domestic or sexual violence between seventy and ninety-five percent. A Stanford analysis found that close to a quarter of women incarcerated for homicide were serving time for offenses tied directly to intimate partner violence.
Michigan supplies its own numbers. Analysis published by the R Street Institute in April 2026, drawing on Prison Policy Initiative and Vera data, put Michigan’s incarceration rate for women at 78 per 100,000 residents, noted that the number of women in Michigan prisons more than tripled between 1978 and 2017, and reported that Michigan incarcerated thirty percent more women between 2009 and 2015 while its male prison population declined. Michigan State Police crime data recorded more than 68,000 domestic violence incidents in 2024 producing over 74,000 victims, with roughly 80 domestic violence related homicides and manslaughters annually.
None of those figures establish how many people are incarcerated in Michigan for offenses their own victimization produced. No agency collects that. The absence of the data is a policy choice, and it is convenient for everyone whose budget depends on the answer staying unknown.
No Michigan statute makes documented victimization a defined mitigating factor. Four states have one.
No equivalent to New York’s Criminal Procedure Law 440.47. A person sentenced before any future reform would have no vehicle.
Wilson permits it. Christel reserved the question in 1995 and the Supreme Court has not returned to it. Admissibility varies by courtroom.
Generous on retreat, hostile on timeframe. The commission-of-a-crime condition excludes coerced defendants by operation.
A partial set-aside framework exists and HB 5009 through 5013 would expand it. Expungement is backward-looking relief that arrives after the conviction has done its work.
Free national technical assistance exists and reaches Michigan. It is only reachable through counsel, which makes appointed counsel the bottleneck.
Jail exposure of 93 days with no jury, and a private petitioner’s retained attorney may prosecute the criminal contempt. The right to appointed counsel exists in the rule and depends on the respondent invoking it.
MCL 750.411h describes the conduct of the person being stalked and the person stalking in the same enumerated terms. Everything separating them sits in one carve-out clause.
No Michigan agency tracks how many incarcerated people are serving sentences for offenses connected to their own victimization.
What the Counterargument Actually Says
Prosecutorial objections to survivor sentencing legislation are not frivolous and should not be waved off. The three that recur are the prospect of high-volume petitions with weak nexus showings, the emotional cost to a deceased person’s family of relitigating a resolved case, and the integrity of a process where the person best positioned to describe the abuse is also the person with the strongest incentive to describe it. R Street, which supports this legislation, treats all three as legitimate drafting inputs rather than obstacles.
The drafting answers are known. Nexus requirements do the heavy lifting: New York’s statute requires proof that the abuse was a significant contributing factor to the offense, which screens out generalized trauma histories. Judicial gatekeeping at the petition stage filters legally insufficient applications before a hearing. Notice to prosecutors and structured victim input are standard. Oklahoma and Georgia passed with these safeguards and with law enforcement at the table.
There is a second objection worth naming because it is rarely stated directly. If courts may consider abuse history as mitigation, some percentage of people who were not meaningfully coerced will benefit. That is true. It is also true of every mitigating factor a sentencing court considers, including age, cognitive impairment, and addiction. The question is not whether a mitigation framework can be gamed. It is whether the current arrangement, in which the information is excluded by default and admitted only when a lawyer knows how to fight for it, produces more accurate sentences. It does not.
What Is Documented, What Is Not, and What Remains Open
Documented: the National Defense Center’s scope, services, and cost structure, taken from its own published materials. The holdings and procedural posture of Wilson, Christel, and Spaulding. The text of MCL 780.951, 780.972, and 780.973, and of MCL 750.411h and 750.411i. The procedural terms of MCR 3.703, 3.706, and 3.708, including the fee structure, the statewide venue rule for adult respondents, the prohibition on mutual orders, the 93-day and $500 criminal contempt sanction, the absence of a jury right, the private prosecution provision, and the advice and appointment of counsel requirements. The enactment dates and mechanisms of the New York, Oklahoma, Georgia, and New Jersey statutes. The introduction date and committee status of Michigan House Bills 5009 through 5013.
Analysis, not finding: the characterization of the Christel reservation as an asymmetry that disadvantages survivor-defendants. Christel is a criminal sexual conduct case and its silence on defense use is a limitation of its posture, not a ruling. Also analysis: the reading of MCL 750.411h as role-neutral on its face. The statute has withstood constitutional challenge and the legitimate-purpose carve-out exists precisely to do the sorting. The argument here is that a carve-out decided case by case, by a judge, without a jury, is a thinner protection than an element the moving party must prove.
Not established: that cross-petitions or retaliatory protective order filings occur at any particular rate in Michigan. The rules permit the pattern. Whether it happens often is unmeasured, and this piece does not claim otherwise.
Unanswered: how many people in Michigan custody are serving sentences for conduct tied to their own victimization. How often Michigan trial courts admit or exclude defense-offered expert testimony on battering, and whether that varies by circuit. How frequently PPO contempt proceedings are prosecuted by a petitioner’s retained counsel rather than by a prosecuting attorney, and whether outcomes differ. How often respondents in those proceedings appear without counsel after being advised of the right to appointed counsel. None of those questions has a public answer, and most are answerable from records the state already holds.
Why This Matters Beyond Any One Case
The through line in every category the National Defense Center handles is that the state was present before the charge. Someone called police. Someone sought a protective order. Someone went to an emergency room, or a shelter, or a caseworker. The record of institutional contact usually exists, and it usually shows the system had information it did not act on.
Then the survivor acts, or is coerced into acting, or fails to stop something they had no power to stop, and the same system that produced no protection produces a charge with impressive speed. The state’s failure at the front end becomes the state’s evidence at the back end. The person who could not get anyone to intervene is now the person the intervention is aimed at.
Incarceration does not repair any part of that. It does not treat the injury, restore the household, or return the years. What survivor justice statutes do is considerably more modest than their critics allege and considerably more useful than their absence: they let a judge see the whole file before deciding what a sentence is for.
The stalking channel makes the same point with less ceremony. Michigan built a protective order system that is free to enter, filable in any county, enforceable on signature, and backed by jail. That design is defensible, because the people it was written for often have hours rather than weeks. But a system optimized for speed and access does not ask which party is which, and Michigan has added no mechanism that does the asking. It has instead left the sorting to a single statutory clause about legitimate purpose, evaluated by one judge, with no jury, in a case a private attorney may be prosecuting.
Michigan has not built the framework. Until it does, the difference between a survivor who gets a fair hearing and one who does not comes down to two accidents: whether their lawyer happened to know that a free phone number exists, and whether they had a lawyer at all.
Williams, Rita. When the Survivor Is the Defendant: Michigan’s Missing Framework for Criminalized Survivors, Clutch Justice (Aug. 25, 2026), https://clutchjustice.com/2026/08/25/criminalized-survivors-michigan-defense-framework/.
Williams, R. (2026, August 25). When the survivor is the defendant: Michigan’s missing framework for criminalized survivors. Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/08/25/criminalized-survivors-michigan-defense-framework/
Williams, Rita. “When the Survivor Is the Defendant: Michigan’s Missing Framework for Criminalized Survivors.” Clutch Justice, 25 Aug. 2026, clutchjustice.com/2026/08/25/criminalized-survivors-michigan-defense-framework/.
Williams, Rita. “When the Survivor Is the Defendant: Michigan’s Missing Framework for Criminalized Survivors.” Clutch Justice, August 25, 2026. https://clutchjustice.com/2026/08/25/criminalized-survivors-michigan-defense-framework/.
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