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Opinion | Michigan mothers jailed for surviving abuse deserve to have cases reviewed
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When Linda Nunn walked out of Michigan’s only women’s prison on March 10 of this year, she wasn’t just regaining her freedom. She was reclaiming something far more fundamental: her role as a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.
Linda served nearly 40 years in prison after being convicted of first-degree murder, a charge that carries a mandatory life without parole sentence in Michigan. Her conviction stemmed from an act of self-defense during a sexual assault. After decades of healing, growth and accountability, she was granted clemency, a constitutional act of mercy reserved to the governor. Within days of returning home, she reunited with dozens of family members and met her great-grandchild for the first time.
Her story is not an exception. It is a warning about what happens when courts fail to hear the full story.
Michigan is incarcerating survivors of domestic and sexual violence, many of them mothers and grandmothers, for decades without ever allowing courts to consider the full context of abuse that shaped their actions.
Across the country, the scope of this reality is clear: 86% of incarcerated women report experiencing sexual violence, 77% report intimate partner violence, and 60% report abuse by a caregiver. In Michigan, where the state incarcerates a higher percentage of women than most others, those patterns carry profound consequences for families and communities.
Across the state, survivors are convicted for actions tied to coercion, self-defense or attempts to protect their children. Many are sentenced before courts hear evidence of domestic violence, trafficking, or long-term abuse. And once those sentences are imposed, there are few meaningful opportunities to revisit them, no matter how incomplete the original picture was.
The impact extends far beyond the individual. Nationally, the majority of mothers in prison lived with their children prior to incarceration, and nearly 40% were their children’s sole or primary caretakers. When those women are incarcerated, families fracture, children lose stability and communities absorb the long-term consequences.
There is a better approach, one already taking shape in states across the country: allowing courts to review sentences in cases where abuse, coercion or trafficking were never fully considered. Often referred to as survivor justice laws, these policies create a clear legal pathway for courts to reassess sentences with the full context of abuse. This kind of survivor-centered sentence review does not guarantee release. It ensures something more basic: that justice is based on the full truth.
Survivor justice begins with a simple truth: abuse changes what choices are available. Justice requires acknowledging that reality, not ignoring it. It allows courts to weigh that context, to consider how abuse, coercion or trafficking shaped someone’s actions, while maintaining accountability and protecting public safety.
Michigan does not have to choose between accountability and fairness. It can, and should, build a system that delivers both.
Michigan can and should start by adopting a Survivors Justice Act to create a clear legal pathway for survivor-centered sentence review, ensuring courts can consider evidence of abuse at sentencing and for people who are already in prison. And while that change is well within reach, clemency can be used now to deliver immediate relief and correct cases where that context was ignored. These are not radical ideas. They are measured, evidence-based reforms that bring sentencing closer to reality.
Justice should be strong enough to hold both truths at once: that harm matters, and that context does too.
As we celebrate mothers this month, it offers a moment to ask who is missing from our definition of justice, and why so many mothers who survived abuse remain behind bars without a full hearing of their circumstances.
Until Michigan does that, it is not just incarcerating survivors. It is limiting the state’s ability to deliver a more complete and credible system of justice.
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