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Disillusioned with the adversarial justice system?
- Steph Turner
- Jan 23
- 13 min read
Disgusted with the adversarial justice system?
Consider the emerging alternative of need-response, a new professional service in development to address needs beyond legalistic or psychological limitations. Based on anankelogy, the new social science for understanding our needs, it applies and prioritizes responses to our inflexible needs. One caring act at a time.
Which do you prefer?
Keep up your hopes by staying with established institutions and attempts to reform them.
OR
Join efforts to co-create a new alternative centered on accountably responding to needs.
With the following prompts, I asked ChatGPT to list the pain points of those who the new professional service of need-response is being created to serve.
“List of pain points among those disillusioned with the adversarial justice system.” It gave me 10 pain points below.
“List of pain points of those disillusioned with the innocence movement below.” It gave me the two sets pain points below, totaling 20.
Need-response can fill the gaps left by the adversarial legal system
Now let’s look at how need-response better serves those underserved and disillusioned by our failing institutions. Need-response could be the answer to each of these pain points.
After each point below, I briefly share how need-response can be far, far better. Click on the right-arrow to learn more.
This is where you can join the effort. You are welcomed to respond to this vision, add to it, critique it. You're encouraged to help shape this alternative for resolving more needs and improving our overall wellness.
“Here are some common pain points felt by those disillusioned with the adversarial justice system.” And how need-response can be the answer.
“Perception that wealthier individuals have more access to quality legal representation, while low-income individuals face significant barriers.”
Need-response starts free and spreads costs as an investment in your improvements.
Need-response counters the cost of accessing legal assistance by offering its initial services for free. After a two-week trial period, the client invests what they can afford. They put a little of their own skin in the game to inspire others to invest in their improving wellness and to reach their noble goal. Costs are spread out in a crowdfunded campaign. Contributing to the costs is more of an investment with shareable benefits for all. The campaign incentivizes more resourceful wealthier others to invest even more. This all follows a key principle: no one should have to pay to solve a problem created by others.
“Belief that the adversarial system often prioritizes ‘winning’ cases over discovering the truth or achieving fair outcomes.”
Need-response prioritizes each side’s inflexible needs over winning a case.
Need-response holds accountable the power and discretion of the prosecutor. Despite the Supreme Court asserting in 1936 that the prosecutor’s duty is to ensure justice is done, and not merely to win a case, the current culture of the adversarial system continues to incentivize winning convictions over creating measurable just outcomes. Need-response shifts to incentivize resolving justice needs, largely by debunking the assumption that all sides in a conflict are vehemently opposed to each other. Only after exhausting all attempts to mutually address the inflexible needs on all sides of a conflict do we revert to hostile options, not before. Need-response shows how there is no such thing as winning against inflexible needs. Resisting what the accused or accuser inflexibly needs does not extinguish moral conflict but enflames it. The more a prosecutor “wins” against a defendant’s or complaint’s inflexible needs, the more those needs persist, sometimes violently. Where necessary to ensure the twofold aim that “guilt shall not escape nor innocence suffer”, need-response conditions public funding to serve public needs. This holds all funding streams accountable, to cease enabling the empirical evil of wrongful convictions. The public shall not be coerced to pay to undermine its own interests of justice or measurably compromise public safety. Instead of blindly funding prosecutors who let violators persist by targeting the wrong person, need-response holds the whole judicial system accountable. Not only to create just outcomes, but to improve the wellness of us all.
“Concerns that the system focuses on punishment rather than rehabilitation or restorative justice, leading to high recidivism rates.”
Need-response puts inflexible needs ahead of our flexible reactions to them.
Need-response prioritizes the role of need. Not only the inflexible needs of the punished, and how callous hindrance of their inflexible needs risk recidivism, but also the affected needs of the jailers. Their relative privilege lets them ease their needs more than the incarcerated. If the jailer’s job security benefits from recidivism, need-response challenges the legitimacy of that adversarial culture. Then proactively addresses the underappreciated causes of violence, which always involves the role of unmet need. Just about everyone kept from resolving their inflexible needs can be driven to a point where they resort to desperate acts of violence for prompt relief. Need-response illuminates the hidden conflict of interest where jailers gain job security the more they impede rehabilitation or restorative outcomes. Need-response checks the carceral system’s many self-serving damaging norms: hyper-individualism; hyperrationality; avoidant generalizing; punitive adversarialism—all ineffective at stemming the problem of violence. Need-response recognizes how wellness is psychosocial and not merely psychological. To restore wellness in society, need-response seeks to rehabilitate the offending jailers along with the incarcerated offenders who viscerally know but often cannot freely admit how vulnerable we all are to external factors shaping wellness.
“Worry that racial, socioeconomic, and other biases lead to unfair treatment or harsher sentencing for marginalized communities.”
Need-response complements or competes with the law to produce impartial results.
Need-response rips off the lid to expose the many sins of the legal system and its enablers. Its adversarial approach too easily incentivizes many biases, especially confirmation bias and tunnel vision. The further someone’s identity from a law enforcer’s presumption of the “good guy”, the more easily targeted as a likely “bad guy”. Veterans recruited as officers tend to objectify citizens as good or bad, sometimes with lethal consequences when feeling threatened. Need-response unpacks the dynamics of each other’s affected needs, and can inform better rules of engagement to minimize or avoid any costly mistakes. Need-response can complement or compete with judicial officials to accountably pursue the interests of justice. Without any competition, law enforcement tends to see itself as a hammer pounding us objectified nails. The lower our social status with meager resources, the easier to pound. Unlike need-response, legal professionals remain unaccountable to their actual impacts on the needs that laws exist to serve. And rarely alerted to the damaging impacts from their ideological bent. Only need-response accountably resolves more needs to reduce cause of violence, and improve the social order. Not top down but bottom up. The bottom line of need-response is improved functioning by resolving more of our inflexible needs.
“Frustration with the length and expense of legal proceedings, which often make justice inaccessible for many people.”
Need-response serve justice needs more quickly and cheaply than the legal system.
Need-response challenges the slow pace of legal proceedings. Along with any exorbitant costs impeding the rights of those less well-off. Not only is justice delayed justice denied, barriers to flexible affordability become barriers to resolving inflexible needs. Need-response sets a timeline for achieving milestones. Failure to achieve a goal within the afforded window of opportunity risks diminishing legitimacy. When competing with the legal process and achieving milestone goals quicker than that adversarial approach, need-response earns greater legitimacy. For example, when a need-responder using a conciliatory approach can incentivize a perpetrator to admit their wrongdoing quicker than a defense-provoking legalist, need-response earns greater legitimacy or more trustworthiness. Need-response starts free, offering help without any expensive retainer or court fees. Costs get distributed more widely among those investing in just outcomes for all. Lower initial expenses and quicker effective results of need-response can prompt legal professionals to improve their quality, decrease their response times, and decrease their entry costs. Justice shall be accessible to all.
“Belief that the over-reliance on plea bargains can pressure innocent individuals into pleading guilty due to fear of harsher sentences if convicted at trial.”
Need-response produces safer communities without adversarial categories.
Need-response upends reliance of the guilt-innocence binary. Inflexible needs of individuals take precedence over institutional needs like this convenience category. Need-response does not vacillate between these extremes; no one is ever solely guilty on their own and no one is completely innocent of harmful wrongdoing—least of all prosecutors guilty of wrongly convicting the innocent. Need-response identifies and addresses specific needs affected by a situation without resorting to these defense-provoking adversarial categories. Further, it challenges law enforcement to recognize the many distortions of just outcomes from their imposing hostile processes. Need-response measures just outcomes by how safe a community actually is from not only individual acts of violence but also from coercive state violence. That can include such pervasive threats as innocence deniers, trial penalty benefactors, conviction finality apologists, and blind faith in the carceral system. Under need-response, the standard prosecutors apply to the accused gets equally applied to them on an individual level. On a social impact level, need-response raises the justice bar from conviction rates to highly functional communities. Then tests the friction from those prosecutors losing ground as need-responsive succeeds where they personally and systemically fail.
“Concern over the power of prosecutors to make critical decisions, such as charging, that can heavily influence case outcomes.”
Need-response holds prosecutors accountable for their actions and inactions.
Need-response prioritizes your inflexible justice needs over the flexible social influence of prosecutors. Need-response recognizes how the prosecutor does not exact literal “power” unless they enable resolving your needs. Power isn’t really power unless it resolves needs; otherwise it’s just coercive force. You cannot choose to not have your justice needs, while the prosecutor can choose to charge or not. Need-response incentivizes all law enforcement and judicial personnel to honor your inflexible needs over their flexible institutional practices. Both the affected needs of accusers and those of the accused. The less you can resolve your justice needs, the more pain you suffer. Which can compel you to act desperately for relief, even spilling over into illegal acts of violence. The more law enforcement gains from trapping you into the pain of your unmet needs, the more this implicit conflict of interest undermines the interests of justice for which prosecutors exist to serve. The less you can resolve your affected needs due to their official actions or inactions, the less legitimate their influence over you and your fate. Holding greater “power” comes with greater responsibility and accountability. Need-response can hold prosecutors accountable to justice outcomes simply by gaging the wellness level of a population.
“A perception that sentencing is often disproportionately harsh, especially for non-violent crimes.”
Need-response offers a more responsive alternative to ineffective incapacitation.
Need-response challenges the legitimacy of the adversarial legal approach, in at least five ways. First, it’s over-emphasis on personal responsibility neglecting social responsibilities to damaged individuals. Second, its self-serving rationalizing when inflicting pain in ways not established as resolving any accuser’s affected justice needs. Third, its reliance on generalities that neglect relevant specifics. Fourth, its alienating avoidance of uncomfortable details that sidesteps potential to mutually engage each side’s affected justice needs. And fifth, its rush to antagonistically oppose the accused that provokes defensive behavior it can then use to paint the accused as inherently bad. Improper sentencing tends to mirror all five of these elements. Reacting to individual violence with state violence tends to backfire, which rewards state violence with revenue. Punitive sentencing feeds itself with more bodies to fill prison beds, as it often hinders such bodies from fully resolving their needs. Harsher sentences typically produce revenue for the system, immediately and in the long-term by instigating recidivism. By contrast, need-response nurtures safer communities by incentivizing each other to identify and address each other’s needs in a climate of mutuality. Everyone wins.
“Worry that certain evidence types, like eyewitness testimony or coerced confessions, are unreliable yet still heavily relied upon.”
Need-response unpacks the motives of investigators who rely upon weak standards.
Need-response investigates what criminal investigators gain from relying upon faulty crime solving methods. When tasked to comfort a crime victim, they may be motivated to trust even debunked pseudoscience like burn patterns or bit marks. If an apparent eyewitness supports the investigator’s assumptions, the emotional charge to offer relief to the victim can understandably lead down the slippery path of confirmation bias. If finding some way to coerce the suspect to admit to more than they actually did, the investigator may have little motive for checking the accuracy. Or for self-awareness how they pressured the suspect to confess to a crime that never even occurred. For each questionable investigative tool, need-response inquires what the investigator personally gains or risk losing from its use. Then inquires how its use affects the independent interest of security and justice. It does this all from an amicable perspective, outside of the bias-inducing bubble of the adversarial process. But can potentially become far more adversarial when resisted. When it comes to answering the age-old question ‘who watches the watchers’, we do. Need-response holds all accountable to resolve justice and other needs to ensure wellness, with minimal to no costs imposed upon others. No one—not even the adversarial justice system—is above the greatest law of love, of properly resolving each other’s needs as one’s own, to improve overall wellness.
“Frustration that the system often fails to address root causes of crime, leading to a cycle of re-offense rather than prevention and support.”
Need-response proactively addresses the unresolved needs at the root of all violence.
Need-response starts with inflexible needs. The less resolve, the more pain your inflexible needs provoke within you, to compel you to act for their relief. The more painful, anyone can be tempted to seek relief by force. Or impose so much self-restraint that they risk mental health issues like anxiety and depression. Criminal violence often occurs after an eruption of failed self-restraint, as the painfully unmet need compels desperate action for relief. This sets the abuse cycle in motion, until those needs can finally be addressed and adequately resolved. Any adversarial approach risks perpetuating this cycle of abuse. Need-response takes a far more disciplined approach. Instead of relying on the socially constructed label of “crime” which biases attention to less isolated wrongdoers, it looks at all impactful violence. Need-response unpacks the motivated reasoning of state violence apologists, who blames all recidivism exclusively on individual offenders. The more dependent upon a carceral culture of objectified offenders, then the more dismissive of imperfect rehabilitation efforts by falsely claiming that “nothing works”. Need-response challenges such ideological bias, which selfishly overemphasizes personal responsibility of disliked others devoid of social responsibilities toward them. Especially toward outgroup members with limited opportunities and more encounters with law enforcement. Need-response recognizes how wellness is psychosocial. And sits ready to incentivize our institutions to respond equally to our internal and external needs, as a basis for earning legitimacy. There can be no justice without it.
Need-response offers a compelling alternative to the adversarial legal process.
More about this law-fit alternative later. It can complement or compete with legalistic institutions.
Need-response addresses the problem of overlooked wrongful convictions in two phases. The first attempts to improve innocence claim forms used by innocence projects. The second moves beyond the adversarial legal process itself to address the affected needs on all sides.
This first step offers an estimated score of likely innocence, by comparing the innocence claim to those cases already exonerated. Since its creation, academic Carrie Leonetti, of the University of Auckland School of Law, has published a similar innocence checklist.
The innocence claimant downloads an Estimated Innocence Form. After filling it out with the details of the case, they see it will automatically produce an Estimated Innocence Report with a score of viable innocence, and a quick summary of the compelling nature of the claim.
You can find this form for innocence claimants right here.
This form is also offered to innocence litigators here.
You can find this form filled out by the author right here.
Estimated innocence of Steph Turner when compared to already exonerated cases:
92% chance of likely innocence.
Asexual person comes out as trans in early 90s. Is spiritually compelled to transcend polarizing differences to resolve needs. Nonconformity results in being falsely accused as a “sexual predator” homophobic stereotype. Convicted without evidence. Must register as sex offender for life. Forced into poverty and homelessness. Rejected cornerstone.
No other criminal history
Consistently maintained innocence, took no plea deals
Transphobic investigation and prosecution
Convicted without corroborating evidence
Climate of sex abuse hysteria
Media sensationalized coverage
Exculpatory evidence overlooked with untested DNA
Spiritual compulsion to resolve needs at odds with judicial system
Asexual "transspirit" registered for life as a sex offender
But what if the innocence claimant, with a high viability score, still cannot get their wrongful conviction reversed in a court of law? Need-response then asserts the higher authority of properly resolved needs.
Need-response goes beyond asserting innocence by addressing all the affected needs on each side of a conflict. Need-response incentivizes the innocence claimant to transcend the imposing limits of the adversarial approach to respond directly to each others' needs.
Only need-response links the purpose of any law to accountably measure the actual outcomes of its application and enforcement. Mutual respect resolves more needs than mutual defensiveness.
This provides innocence claimants underserved by the legal process to then challenge the limits of the adversarial approach. This offers a mutuality alternative much more responsive to each side's needs. Laws themselves to not resolve needs; we do.
You can find the empty form here.
You can find this form filled out by the author right here.
You can get to the meat of this responsive alternative by reading the responses to these three key items.
"I sense she presented a personal struggle with her own emerging sexuality as same-sex attracted. She later came out as lesbian. She appears to be drawn to my transgender sister as someone openly being herself in a way she likely wish she could be. Or at least drawn to explore what this could all mean for her, at a time when LGBTQ+ people were largely marginalized by mainstream society and not readily accepted at home. When caught not at home when confronted by her mother, she could not say that she willingly interacted with such a "deviant" in the neighborhood."
"My dominant need at the time was to come out as transgender without being smeared with popular transphobic or homophobic tropes, such as the widespread belief that we're more inclined to pedophilia than cisgender and straight males. To not be falsely accused of sexual misconduct but instead be accepted as an asexual (demisexual) person. Once accused, to have the preponderance of evidence favoring my innocence to show that I am not guilty of what I am not capable of doing. Once wrongly convicted, to be exonerated. Once sentenced to lifetime sex offender registration, to be removed from that listing with prejudice. Ultimately, to have legal recourse in a system less adversarial and based more on mutually addressing the affected needs on all sides to a conflict."
"If the law would allow it, I would affirm her same-sex attraction. And tell her that I do not personally hold any animosity toward her. I hold no grudge against her for falsely accusing me of things I am not capable of doing. I understand her need at the time to not be out to her mother or to her homophobic-presenting stepfather. I understand her motive to accuse my sibling and then me to avoid getting into trouble by her irate mother, when her mother demanded to know why she was not at home when her mother came home from work. I understand how she was incentivized by the homophobia of the time, that prompted her to shift the spotlight onto us and to then see how the adults would react to other LGBTQ+ people like herself. I appreciate how the reaction toward us would keep her in the proverbial closet for a long time."
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