OPINION
Courts talk about justice, yet in the New Jersey sentencing mandates, they are forced to overlook one of the most powerful forces shaping human behavior. Trauma. Years of violence. Childhood rape. Abuse that rewires fear, judgment, and survival itself. People who carry that pain into a courtroom are treated as if their history does not exist. That failure has punished survivors for years. Survivors who spent nights in fear. Survivors who learned to read danger the way other people read a stop sign. Survivors who entered our criminal system carrying bruises that never made it to the police report. Let me be clear, this article is not about defending people who commit crimes. It is about New Jersey having no statutory path to treat clear evidence of abuse and trauma as a formal mitigating factor during sentencing. This gap in the law punishes victims and perpetrators the same way. It treats survival the same as greed. It forces judges to sentence without context, no matter how severe or verified the abuse was.
Other states have confronted this failure. New York did it because cases kept proving how often survivors of violence end up as criminal defendants. In Poughkeepsie, Nicole “Nikki” Addimando spent years documenting sexual and physical assaults by her partner. In 2017 she shot him. Prosecutors charged her with murder. A judge gave her 19 years to life. Only after years of advocacy did an appellate court apply a law allowing courts to consider the abuse she survived. Her sentence was cut to 7.5 years because the record showed her trauma drove her actions. In New York City, Rosemary Hernandez stabbed and killed her abusive boyfriend. Prosecutors charged her with second degree murder. The court recognized the violence she survived and sentenced her under a statute that allows judges to consider abuse when it directly contributes to a crime. In another New York case, a survivor known publicly as Brenda killed her abusive partner and received harsh terms for manslaughter, assault, and weapons charges. Only after lawmakers changed the statute did an appellate court reduce her sentence. The abuse she endured had always been part of the case. The law simply refused to see it.
The same pattern appears across the country when courts lack a clear rule to address trauma. At age 16, Cyntoia Brown was sold for sex. She shot a man who tried to exploit her. She was treated as a criminal, not a trafficking victim, and served years before receiving clemency. Sara Kruzan was groomed into sex trafficking at age 11. At age 17 she killed her trafficker. She was sentenced to life. Years later, she received a pardon only after the law changed. Keyana Marshall was trafficked at age 15. After her exploitation, she was indicted alongside her trafficker, served time in federal prison, and remains registered as a sex offender for conduct tied directly to her abuse. These cases show the same pattern. Abuse shapes judgment. Abuse creates survival decisions. Abuse follows people into the courtroom while the system looks the other way.
Other states have started to change course. California created its “survivor pathway” law, which lets courts weigh documented trauma during sentencing. Illinois expanded its list of mitigating factors to include evidence of abuse and coercion. Minnesota adopted a similar standard after reviewing cases where victims were punished more harshly than their abusers. These changes did not weaken public safety. They strengthened accountability by grounding it in facts.
New Jersey has not created that path. Our state lists fourteen mitigating factors in sentencing. Age counts. Cooperation counts. Lack of criminal record counts. Verified physical or sexual abuse does not count. If trauma is raised at sentencing, our law offers no guidance on how courts should weigh it, leaving judges to improvise or ignore it entirely. In essence, Judges are forced to sentence without the full picture. Survivors sit in court hearing their life reduced to a charge sheet and their trauma gets erased.
My term in the Assembly is coming to a close. I will not be there when this fight continues. Assembly Bill 4740 allows judges to consider verified physical, sexual, or psychological abuse as a mitigating factor at sentencing. I did not introduce A4740 for a headline or a news cycle. I introduced it because of twenty years standing next to people whose pain was treated as irrelevant. Long before I was an elected official, I sat across from clients who were jailed, lost their families, for actions shaped by trauma the law refused to acknowledge. I saw judges who cared, but had no statutory roadmap. I saw survivors punished without context and without mercy.
A4740 was born from those rooms, those court benches, and those people. I may be leaving Trenton, but the injustice remains. Someone must carry this bill forward. Someone must finish the work. Trauma should not be erased on the same page where justice is written. A4740 strengthens fairness. It brings accuracy to sentencing. It recognizes the difference between a person acting under terror and a person acting to harm others. My time in office is ending, but the need for this reform is not. This bill deserves champions who will stay and finish what I started.
Justice should see the person. Not only the charge.
Jessica Ramirez was elected to the New Jersey State Assembly in 2023. She will depart office on January 13.