China’s judicial clampdown on divorce has diverted marital disputes into the criminal justice system. When judges failed to protect battered women, domestic violence sometimes escalated to criminal battery or homicide. When judges ignored and subverted the law by routinely denying divorce petitions, divorce cases sometimes transformed into criminal cases after abusive husbands murdered their wives and after abused wives, in self-defense, murdered their abusive husbands. Endemic failure on the part of courts and the police to uphold their legal mandates to protect abuse victims has cost lives. So far, China’s criminal courts appear not to recognize domestic violence as a sufficiently mitigating factor to merit probation, much less acquittal, in homicide cases. In trials of women charged with killing their abusive husbands, criminal courts have steadfastly eschewed the concept of “battered woman syndrome,” and have therefore been averse to acquit—or even to sentence to probation in lieu of prison time—the very women they affirmed to be victims of domestic violence. Nonetheless, reforms introduced in 2015 have clearly turned the tide toward leniency in sentencing.