A plea deal kept her out of prison. Now only a governor’s pardon can call it what it truly was: self-defense.
Keshia Golden’s attorneys say that in October 2022, while she was eight-plus months pregnant, her then-boyfriend Calvin Sidney hit her, grabbed her hair and slammed her head against a kitchen counter. Golden grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed Sidney in the leg. Golden only intended to make him stop, she has always insisted. But she hit the femoral artery. Sidney died at a Chicago hospital.
Keshia Golden was charged with first-degree murder and held in jail, where, weeks from giving birth, she was transferred to the medical unit to recover from her injuries. Four years passed.
Then, on Aug. 24, 2026, just before Golden’s trial was to begin, the Cook County state’s attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke offered Golden a last-minute deal: If she pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter and underwent two years of community service, drug testing and probation, she would serve no prison time.
All evidence points to the fact that Golden acted in self-defense and should never have been charged in the first place.
Nonetheless, she accepted the plea.
Her acceptance of this lesser charge is not an admission of guilt. It’s also not justice.
Golden is a single mother who was forced to make an impossible choice to ensure she would be able to raise her 3-year-old daughter. “All she has is me,” Golden said in court.
The facts of this case have always supported Golden’s claims that she was simply trying to get Sidney’s violence to stop. Police had been called at least 50 times regarding the abuse. Sidney was arrested four times for harming Golden. She had gone to the hospital several times following instances of abuse and had lodged an order of protection.
All of this was known to authorities. But there was a single statement that contradicted Golden’s version of events: Sidney’s uncle said that Golden had followed Sidney after the beating and stabbed him later. The state attorney’s office seems to have prioritized this one claim over a mountain of evidence showing Golden was repeatedly abused and that Sidney, not Golden, was the violent one in the relationship.
The arrest, prosecution and incarceration of those acting to protect themselves from abuse is called “criminalized survival.” It almost always affects women and girls, and disproportionately marginalized women and girls.
I have been reporting on the topic for eight years now, and Golden’s situation neatly follows the patterns of criminalized survival as they play out across the country:
A woman being abused reaches out to the state for protection. The state’s response is inadequate, out of reach, or even harmful. Then, unable to find safety, the woman ends up in dire circumstances, faced with the possibility of dying. When she fights back, the very state that repeatedly ignored or abandoned her emerges again. But this time, it is resource-rich, focused, capable and fully intent on punishing her vigorously. By refusing to passively absorb violence during a single terrible encounter, she has become, in the eyes of the system, an offender that must be put away. Her story is erased or remade: Once a victim, now she is a cold-blooded killer.
According to all the well-trod data, Golden was at extremely high risk of being killed by Sidney—not vice versa. Golden’s defense team provided the state’s attorney with a 36-page report from a domestic violence expert, who applied to Golden the danger assessment, a tool commonly used by law enforcement to assess the likelihood of an abused woman being killed.
The expert determined Golden was in the highest category: extreme danger.
Other facts support this: Homicide is the top cause of death for pregnant women in the U.S., with Black women like Golden facing a significantly higher risk than white or Hispanic women. Black women are also at eight times greater risk of pregnancy-associated IPV murder than their non-pregnant peers. When a woman has been strangled by her partner—as Golden says Sidney has done to her (she was hospitalized)—her risk of being killed soars by 750 percent.
At first glance, it seems Golden just barely skirted the statistics, by daring to live.
… At least 30 percent of those serving time on murder or manslaughter charges are criminalized survivors who failed to successfully argue self-defense or were never afforded the opportunity.
Cook County’s O’Neill Burke has decades of experience on all sides of the criminal legal system. Presumably, O’Neill Burke knows about the risk factors facing pregnant Black abuse survivors like Golden, especially considering O’Neill Burke has repeatedly insisted domestic violence victims are a priority of her administration.
In 2025, one year into her term, after Chicago experienced a surge in domestic violence homicides, O’Neill Burke launched a Special Victims Task Force, theoretically intended to help women like Golden. “Every single time a woman has been beaten, choked, killed in front of her children, it really cuts to my heart,” O’Neill Burke told ABC 7 at the time. “Those are the cases that wake me up in the middle of the night.”
And yet O’Neill Burke’s office pursued a conviction that could have landed Golden in prison for 60 years, and left her daughter, who has faced health complications that required multiple surgeries, without a parent.
Technically, the job of a prosecutor is to do justice. It is neither to land convictions, nor to use state resources to pursue charges at all costs. Prosecutors can and should decline to charge in clear cases of self-defense, but they often struggle with women like Golden. The criminal legal system demands black-and-white categorizations that real human beings do not fit into: Offenders kill, victims die; offenders are monsters, victims are angels. By using violence to live, a woman cannot be a victim or an angel; she must therefore be an offender. There is no other space into which she fits.
For my book Unreasonable Women, I conducted a survey of women in prison across America, which showed at least 30 percent of those serving time on murder or manslaughter charges are criminalized survivors who failed to successfully argue self-defense or were never afforded the opportunity. They have been disappeared into prisons, sometimes for a lifetime, their stories largely unknown or negated.
Golden’s case is unusual because she received sustained, high-profile support from a committed legal team at the Cook County Public Defender’s Office.
Simultaneously, an educated, informed group of organizers in Chicago, Moms United Against Violence and Incarceration, has long been devoted to advocating for criminalized survivors. They conducted a multi-year campaign to support Golden.
These efforts culminated in media attention and social media outrage, shining a light on a case that would otherwise be kept in the shadows, and creating outsized pressure on the state’s attorney office, who then made an offer that Golden felt unable to refuse.
“Keshia Golden is innocent,” her lawyer said at a press conference, “but there isn’t a woman or a mother alive that, when faced with spending 20 to 60 years in prison, wouldn’t take a plea deal to probation.”
True justice for Golden should have occurred long before the terrible incident in that Chicago kitchen—by means of front-end support. And to pay for these services, I recommend a reallocation of the $182 billion the U.S. spends on mass incarceration annually: A large portion of these funds should be diverted to boost prevention and response programs, bolster communities, treat trauma, prevent abuse and provide survivors resources to safely leave.
But barring a large-scale systemic reorganization, once Golden was charged, a secondary type of justice would have been informed and compassionate prosecutors who acted in response to all that we know about trauma and abuse, and who were willing to admit error and change course.
They should have dropped the charges.
A single mother who dared to fight back should not have to endure the oppressive and time-consuming process of probation and drug testing, nor a criminal record that hinders how she lives her life and complicates her ability to secure housing, land employment and support her child.
Now, the only remaining path to justice for Golden is a pardon from Gov. JB Pritzker. Such a pardon would send a clear message: No woman should have to die to prove that she was a victim. No one should be punished for surviving abuse, defending themselves or protecting their child.
Keshia Golden, and all who defend themselves against violence, should be free.
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