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Responsive exoneration (tutorial)
- Steph Turner
- Mar 2, 2024
- 15 min read
Updated: May 10, 2024
When the Estimated Innocence Report (EIR) is not enough to help exonerate a wrongly convicted person with a compelling case of actual innocence, maybe it's time to rethink the approach. Instead of repeated disappointment from the adversarial process, try our revolutionary mutuality process. When darkness and hate consistently fails you, it's time to light up the dark and love away the hate. That's what this responsive exoneration is all about.
NOTE: Since creating this page and this tool, it has been renamed Responsive Innocence.
Which do you prefer?
Wait endlessly for the adversarial judicial process to exonerate you/your loved one.
OR
Demonstrate overlooked innocence with this compelling more responsive alternative.
Anyone who has appealed a conviction knows how slow the adversarial judicial system can be to admit its own errors. And slower to correct them, if at all. I created the Estimated Innocence Report with the hope of improving identification of actual innocence. But that may not be enough for a system stuck in its stubborn ways of innocence denial. So I followed up with this Responsive Exoneration tool that replaces unresponsive adversarialism with more responsive mutuality. Because we all know how...
To make the most of this interactive spreadsheet tool, follow these instructions and tips. This takes you through each page of the tool's first and major tab.
This pilot version currently requires MS Excel or reader to utilize. To use its interactive features after downloading it, you will need to click on 'Enable Editing'.
A tutorial for the other tabs will land in the inbox of those who follow or support an innocence wellness campaign. Feel free to follow mine.
1. Responsive exoneration overview
In its current form at the time of this tutorial, the first page works both as an overview with a clickable Table of Contents, and the place to enter basic info of the innocence claimant. The likely score, verification process core, tagline, and brief synopsis are all taken from that claimant's Estimated Innocence Report. Or EIR for short.
If only following another's responsive exoneration wellness campaign, you will not get to see their form filled out. A sample form may be provided so you can get some idea how it works.
Responsive exoneration aims
Aim A: The claimant of compelling innocence (as indicated by their EIR) is exonerated by
dependence upon the adversarial law-serving process, or
independently determined by a mutuality need-serving process
issuing a "declaration of supported innocence" and
cultivating public embrace of its superior findings.
Aim B: If independently exonerated, then get this superior finding accepted by
government officials, starting with the judicial branch, and
the general public, starting with (post-custody)
responsive employers, and
responsive landlords.
Aim C: If independent exoneration stubbornly resisted,
cultivate appropriate response enforcement, and then
apply targeted response enforcement.
Aim D: Improve measurable wellness outcomes of
campaigner-claimant,
invested patrons & supporters.
Campaign followers inspired to improve their own wellness outcomes by starting or joining another wellness campaign. Complainant wellness also supported.
Aim E: Close the "justice gap" of underserved justice needs by demonstrating how this
need-responsive mutuality process
can satisfy more justice needs than the
law-enforcement adversarial process.
Further instruction
2. Your current options
Consider your options along this adversarial-mutuality spectrum. You may prefer to stick to the familiar adversarial process. You know it offers the hope for an official exoneration. Or you may prefer to try this less familiar mutuality approach. Fortunately, you can explore both in tandem.
Further instructions
3. Adversarialism or mutuality
No inputs necessary on this page. This page simply provides more context for comparing the adversarial judicial system with our revolutionary mutuality alternative.
Further instruction
4. Your need-responsive alternative
Here is more insights contrasting the "adversarialism" of the current judicial process with the more responsive "mutuality" alternative we offer. An abbreviate version of this gets included in messages you send to the "impactors" you contact for this wellness campaign.
Further instruction
5. Your responsiveness to all affected needs
Here is the main input page. Here is where you identify the needs central to this conflict. Here you provide the basis to shift from adversarialism to mutuality.
Empathize with what the complainant actually needed at the time.
Identify your own affected needs from this incident.
How would you address complaint's apparent needs if you had the chance?
Later in the process, you invite other to assess how responsive you are to the needs driving this conflict. Much later, you extend this "competitive responsiveness" to others, including the prosecutor. You demonstrate how you can relate to the very needs our laws exist to serve. You give opportunity to see who is more responsive to the complaint's actual needs: You with this mutualizing approach, or those working for the impersonal adversarialist process. You greater responsiveness can build a compelling case for exonerating you.
Further instruction
6. Opportunity to solve a problem
The current adversarial legal system presents largely as an obstacle to your need, and the needs of many others, for full exoneration. Need-response finds ways to turn such obstacles into challenges. Then reshape these as opportunities to solve a problem.
Everyone working within the judicial system remains constrained by laws. Those laws are constrained by politics. Both the judicial system and current politics remain constrained by adversarialism. Exoneration eludes you largely because of these built in structural problems.
Innocence litigators tell you they can only go so far as the current legal structure permits. Need-response goes beyond arbitrary law by addressing the needs that laws exist to serve. You learn you can effect the structural changes necessary in a wellness campaign.
Further instruction
7. Earned legitimacy
People in positions of authority need impact data to know if their professional efforts are producing the intended results. We can do more than provide impact feedback, we can assess their legitimacy to be in power. We can credential any exemplary responsiveness to your thus far overlook justice needs, and any underserved justice needs of the complainant.
For entrenched innocence deniers demonstrating a severe lack of legitimacy, we can entertain options like civil disobedience. For those in authority who seek to improve their legitimacy by co-creating positive outcomes with us, we can help them replace their failed adversarialism and work together in coordinated mutuality—for the right price.
Need-response instills the discipline lacking in adversarial justice and in adversarial politics, and that is to serve the public's objective fact of their unchosen needs. You as a member of the public do not exist for authority; authority exists for you. The wellness campaign inspires your team members to be more responsive to each other's needs, then keep score of each other's level of responsiveness. Then we apply this to authorities like police, lawyers and the prosecutor to assess their legitimacy.
The more responsive to your compelling innocence claim and the many needs involved, the greater the "responsive reputation" of your peers. They set a standard by which we measure the responsiveness of judicial officials to your compelling innocence claim. Their reputation gets documented as their level of earned legitimacy.
Further instruction
8. Structural improvement
What's one of the biggest problems facing you right now? If you're like me, you continually face the problem of an adversarial judicial system far less innocent than yourself. Innocence projects working within the constraints of this adversarial legalism presents as an extension of this structural problem. How can an unjust system reliably serve our justice needs?
Wrongful convictions create opportunity for your wellness team to help create structural improvements. If we can demonstrate how the current structure of adversarialism repeatedly fails the interests of justice, we can improve those structures to clear more viable innocence claims. We can co-create solutions outside of the failing adversarial paradigm.
This means more than simply changing laws within the adversarial system; it means demonstrating a more effective response to justice needs with this mutualizing alternative. It means need-response either complements or competes with the adversarial judicial system to resolve justice needs like exonerating the innocent. It means your wellness campaign may have to refuse the low hanging fruit offered by adversarialism to insist we fully address each other's neglected wellness needs. While no one sits above the law, no law sits above the needs it exists to serve.
Adversarialism works best when a police officer must make a split second decision to determine if you are a threat or not that must be taken down. Once arrested and detained, this immediate oppositional stance that assumes only one should win over the other quickly loses its relevance. Instead of addressing justice needs, adversarialism starts impeding the resolution of justice needs on all sides to an adjudicated conflict.
Only a mutualizing process can fully address and resolve both the justice needs of the accuser and the accused. By contrast, the adversarial process tends to serve its own institutional needs at the expense of the accused and accuser's natural needs.
Only a mutualizing process can address the exposed guilt of law enforcement and prosecutors confronted with their role in damaging innocent lives, ripping apart their families, and destroying vulnerable communities. By contrast, the adversarial process easily provokes their defensiveness, their self-righteousness, and denial of harm.
Only a mutualizing process prioritizing our potential for love over hate, over the politics of fear and animosity, can clear the unacceptably high number of wrongful convictions created by this adversarial structure. By contrast, the adversarial process
Your wellness campaign starts as a simple "case wellness campaign" to focus on your own need for exoneration. It could morph into a "project wellness campaign" to help others similarly situated. The more this type evolves into a "movement wellness campaign", the better we can pool our energies to transform how we as a society create the structural improvements to clear the innocent and reduce or even stop wrongly convicting the innocent.
Further instruction
9. Handling resistance
You have good reason to expect the adversarial judicial system will resist our efforts. You can anticipate the prosecutor will rebuff our efforts. You can understand if no one within the long established adversarial system takes us seriously, at least at first.
Resistance to change occurs to us all. The more privileged with influential power, the less inclined to adopt this revolutionary alternative. They may be thinking: How dare these upstarts claim a higher authority than our traditional laws?
To handle such likely resistance, need-response offers the familiar two-prong approach of the carrot and stick. Check the list of ways we can incentivize judicial powerholders like the prosecutor. Then see the list of ways we can penalize unresponsive judicial powerholders.
The wellness campaign can utilize both. You handle resistance by applying the "praise sandwich" format that sandwiches the "bad news" of our punitive sanction in between the "good news" of our rewarding options. You get an example on exactly how in the next page.
Our mutuality approach encourages resisters to realize the structural pressures built into adversarialism that fuels their imperceptible slide away from serving the interests of justice. Sociology explains how an institution can easily drift from its founding purpose. Many institutions devolve into serving itself at the expense of serving those in the public for which it exists to serve. Its participants start out with a passion to serve the people in desperate need. Then pressures from revenue sources or other powerful sources pulls them off course.
Institutional needs become prioritized over mission needs. For example, evidence can be found to show how judicial officials assert "conviction finality" less to assure closure for grieving victim-survivors and more to serve the institution by reducing the docket of "meritless" yet compelling claims of innocence. Such an adversarial system can no longer address justice needs justly. It can quickly become a "justice" system in name only. Which feeds bodies into a corrections department that "corrects" in name only.
As Dr. King warned us, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." When the only institution claiming a monopoly on administering justice cannot administer the justice of both
clearing all wrongful convictions, and
preventing any further miscarriages of justice,
we challenge their failing adversarialism with our mutualizing alternative. We confront their subjective definition of justice with our anankelogical definition: To allow everyone’s unchosen needs to fully resolve without impedance from any other. In contrast to their "justice", we recognize how each unchosen need can be objectively identified, and its level of resolution can be empirically measured.
By contrast, adversarial "justice" favors the needs of the winning side in an argument against the needs of the losing side. It presumes justice can be reduced to procedural form that neglects the deeper substance of fairly addressing each other's unchosen needs. They treat all needs as subjective and hence can be ignored. But this always results in pain and problems, such as addictions to cope with the consequential pain of unresolved needs. The more their "justice" fails to resolve our justice needs, the more they unethically lull us into depending on them as the sole provider to serve our justice needs. Not anymore!
We dare these diehards to resist our empirically defined needs.
To echo the fictional Borg: "Resistance is futile." But also quite inevitable among those glued to the alienation of our legalistic systems. An adversarial system anchored in impersonal laws too easily fails to serve the specific needs beyond the scope of the law. Need-response now exists to provide a mutualizing alternative that can be more responsive than adversarial systems. As Gordon Fellman put it, "We can choose to further the development of mutuality institutions.” We can choose to watch the watchers. If not us, who will? Who holds accountable those who hold us to account?
To restore society's collective wellness, we must engage the unchosen needs on all sides of any conflict. We can then reliably question and improve how we respond (or not respond) to such needs. We can move past the stifling legalism of our impersonal systems that posit chosen institutional needs over our unchosen needs. We can replace structural norms that alienate us from each other, and prematurely pits us against each other, by personally engaging each other's unchosen needs. We can honor the unchosen needs of others as we would have them honor our own.
If the adversarial systems of judiciary and politics can effectively address our unchosen needs, then we defer to their successes. We shall not resist. But we must challenge any institution or ascribed authority resisting the resolution of our unchosen needs. We must not passively tolerate their anti-wellness structural norms. We must resist their resistance that damages our lives for their arbitrary benefit. The bottom line is our wellness outcomes after allowing our needs to fully resolve, and not what legal experts declare about things they cannot possibly know in detail about our disengaged lives.
In short, authority figures can either respond to our unchosen needs or be left behind in the dustbin of history. The higher standard of "you shall love" can no longer be ignored!
Further instruction
10. Engage
Together, we pioneer this mutualizing alternative to adversarialism to more responsibly resolve justice needs. We shift from adversarial alienation to mutually engaging each other's needs. Anankelogy recognizes how the more each other's needs can be resolved, the more our problems can be solved.
The first problem you solve as a campaigner is your diminished capacity to endure the discomfort of resolving needs. To resolve a need, you first must embrace your body's natural warning of some perceived threat to your ability to fully function. You likely developed a habit of avoiding these painful warnings, as most of us have. We stretch your comfort zone so you can boldly process more painful needs requiring your full attention.
Next, you stretch your ability to remain open on nondefensive during a conflict. You learn to follow this four-step cycle to address the underserved needs fueling our stubborn problems. You learn to distinguish between your unchosen needs and your chosen responses to them. Then distinguish between others unchosen needs and their chosen responses to them. You engage the actual needs our laws exist to serve. You prepare the foundation to demonstrate your overlooked innocence.
Further instruction
11. Impactors list
The wellness campaign levels the power differential between judicial powerholders and your relative powerlessness. Anankelogy labels these powerholders as Impactors and you as an Impactee.
The Impactor impacts the relation more than impacted by it. We abbreviate this as AI.
Ascribed Impactor when initially identified. But we could be in error.
Acknowledged Impactor when admitting their greater influence.
The Impactee is impacted by the relation more than impacting it. We abbreviate this as RI.
Reporting Impactor when initially identified. But we could be in error.
Recognized Impactor when realizing their lesser influence.
The power imbalance privileges the powerholding AI to get their way more than the relatively powerless RI. That can create power problems, or powerful opportunities.
The more this enables the AI to serve needs with their unique qualifications, their expertise or greater resources, the more legitimate this power differential.
The more this interferes with resolving any of the RI's unchosen needs, the less legitimate the power differential.
The adversarial process suggests the RI must win over the AI with better arguments or with a more persuasive narrative. The AI then counters with their arguments or persuasive story, and they typically have the advantage to prevail. This tends to pull the AI and RI into wasting their precious time and energies on a power struggle. And distract both from addressing the persisting needs, ensuring continued emotional pain.
This is a key flaw in the adversarial process.
Both sides end up focusing more on gaining what they can to clutch at relief. Until each affected unchosen need can freely resolve, each will continue to suffer from repeated warnings from their own bodies that their ability to function remains threatened. Mutual defensiveness tends to lock both into a cycle of deepening despair. The AI typically has the greater means to get through this troubling phenomenon.
The wellness campaign's mutualizing process prioritizes unchosen needs over chosen arguments or narratives. This more engaging alternative encourages both AI and RI to shift from mutual defensiveness to mutual support of each other's unchosen needs. The more each side's needs can resolve, the less emotional pain exists for them to try to avoid.
This is a key advantage to the mutualizing wellness process.
Both sides can then focus more on resolving the needs that fuel problems. The innocence claimant and their supporters can connect better with innocence litigators and their driving needs. Then connect with judicial officials by prioritizing their unchosen needs over blindly serving institutional needs, which tends to benefit those with more power than themselves. Then finally connect better with the DA and prosecutor, and relevant judges, to serve the higher interests of justice over the lower interests of judicial power.
Along the way, we all discover better choices to respond to unchosen needs. Both the unchosen need for public safety and unchosen need for exoneration. These needs tend to clash in an adversarial paradigm. But can complement each other in a mutuality paradigm.
You can pioneer this fresh approach to exonerating the innocent.
This final page serves as a segue to the next tabs of this spreadsheet tool. Here is where you locate the name and contact info of those impacting your wrongful conviction in some way. You likely will not need all 50 entries. Start with the prosecutor.
Each entry automatically fills the dropdown list in the "intro" tab and "PM" tab messaging templates. When ready to invite the prosecutor to your exoneration wellness campaign, you go first to the "intro" tab and select the prosecutor's name from the dropdown list. This automatically adds the provided email address.
After sending each message, you come back here to document the date you sent it to each invitee. And then you document the level of their reply to each of the three messages.
1) Introduction
You gage their responsiveness after introducing them to a summary of your case and this alternative to the court's unresponsive adversarial process.
Strong affirm: positive feedback
Weak affirm: lukewarm acceptance
Equivocal: general acknowledgment
Weak refusal: soft objections
Strong refusal: hostile rejection
No response: never replied in time
2) Personal message
After sending an invitee your Personal Message (using the PM tab), you rate their responsiveness to your responsiveness to the needs affected by this case.
Fully agrees: Fully agrees innocence claimant appreciates claimant's needs
Mostly agrees: Mostly agrees innocence claimant appreciates claimant's needs
No stance: Provides no stance on whether agreeing or disagreeing
Mostly disagrees: Mostly disagrees innocence claimant appreciates claimant's needs
Fully disagrees: Fully disagrees innocence claimant appreciates claimant's needs
No reply: Never responded in a timely manner
3) Follow-up
After following up with an invitation to participate in your wellness campaign, you rate their responsiveness to engaging this mutualizing alternative.
Hard yes: invitee willingly participates
Soft yes: invitee hesitantly participates
Equivocal: invitee undecided if participating
Soft no: invitee unwilling to participate
Hard no: invitee refuses to participate
No reply: invitee never responded in time
You ease them into this pioneering mutualizing approach. You first introduce them to need-response with the intro tab. Here is where you acquaint them with a summary of your case of compelling innocence. Then orient them to our need-responsive alternative.
Whether or not they acknowledge receipt of your introduction, you invite them to
assess how well you appreciate the complainant's needs as you understand them,
invite them to respond to your expressed affected needs, and finally invite them to
rate your responsiveness to the complainant's needs as you understand them.
You follow-up by inviting them to participate in your wellness campaign. Each invitee is to join your campaign as a "follower" for free. Later you offer the opportunity to invest in your need-satisfying inner circle, after selling them on the benefits.
Early on, you can first practice this messaging feature when inviting your friends and family to follow your upcoming campaign. Then offer the opportunity to invest as a patron or supporter of your emerging campaign.
You send these messages to Impactors within this coordinated support of these fellow Impactees. With their encouragement, you begin to assert the higher standard of need-response over problematic law enforcement. Together as a team, you lay a foundation for exoneration with the greater power of love.
Further instruction
Ready to apply this?
From estimated innocence to responsive exoneration
Do you need your own copy of the Estimated Innocence Form?
An innocence claimant or their peer supporter can download their own copy here.
Are you or someone you know wrongly convicted and not yet exonerated?
Prove your innocence without lawyers
Let the facts of your case automatically calculate your innocence.
An innocence litigator or judicial official can download their own copy here.
Still processing paper forms from countless pleas for help?
Let us presort the claims for you
You can then instantly know how to best serve each claimant.
Both are exactly the same. See a sample of a completed form here.
For incarcerated innocence claimants, you can print and send this tri-fold brochure. And download here a paper form you can print out and send to them to fill out. This would be the role for the ALLY proxy.
These items for the unexonerated are hosted on my earlier website Value Relating, which I am no longer able to edit. My attempts to start an innocence agency and launch an advocacy campaign around need-response has evolved significantly since then. If your innocence claim scores high using the EIF, take this opportunity to co-create this pioneering new service.
Or follow another's wellness campaign to see if this can work for you or your wrongly convicted loved one. At the start, we're primarily serving those with a strong claim of actual innocence. Eventually we hope to expand this to address the affected needs of anyone improperly treated by the criminal judicial system. And that could ultimately include everyone. For now, we must start small and aim for the most easily attainable.
Your responsiveness to responsive exoneration
Your turn. Consider one or more of these options to respond to this need-responsive content.
Check our Engaging Forum to FOLLOW discussions on this post and others. JOIN us as a site member to interact others and create your forum comments. Ask questions about how this can support your innocence claim. Suggest improvements. Get involved in co-creating this much-need new service.
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