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Disillusioned with the innocence movement?
- Steph Turner
- Jan 23
- 22 min read
We know there are far more innocence claimants than innocence litigators to review their viable innocence claims. Are you or a loved one among them?
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 of those disillusioned with the innocence movement below.” It gave me the two sets pain points below, totaling 20.
Need-response exists to serve you
Now let’s look at how need-response better serves those underserved and disillusioned by our failing institutions. First...
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.
For anyone who doubts the need for an alternative to its adversarial approach
Much of the public remains naive about the true workings of the adversarial judicial process.
Many accept we have the best judicial system in the world, yet cannot explain how this great system results in the highest incarceration rate in the world.
As long as they feel safe in their person and property, they often misattribute their sense of security to law enforcement that rarely if ever disrupts their lives. They poorly assume that law enforcement only targets those who are clearly guilty of wrongdoing.
This betrays their fundamental attribution error, which overemphasizes personal agency and underappreciates environmental factors shaping human behavior. They conveniently ignore the actual negative impacts from the imperfect human institutions they blindly trust.
The inexperienced public may blindly believe that law enforcement would never target them, because they know they are not guilty of any crime. They likely believe the line between guilt and innocence is clearly black and white. You either did the crime or you didn't. But those better acquainted with the dark side of the criminal justice system realize the difference between legal guilt and legal acquittal can be quite blurred.
Law enforcement works under many social and political pressures to quickly apprehend suspects. They are typically granted leeway to stop violence by almost almost any means necessary. Errors abound. Lives get upended. The innocent get arrested. Once arrested, the accused are typically assumed to be guilty. And often found guilty erroneously.
"We know without doubt that the vast majority of innocent defendants who
are [wrongly] convicted of crimes are never identified and cleared."
- Samuel Gross, editor of the National Registry of Exonerations as reported in 2015 in the Washington Post.
When no corroborating evidence is necessary for a conviction, as in my case, this trusted system can destroy many innocent lives, along with the family and communities that depend upon them. These too often include vulnerable families and communities, such as people of color and LGBTQ+ members, who can be easy prey for the biases built into the adversarial process.
Other types of damaging errors abound. Official misconduct. Junk science. Witness misidentifiation. Jailhouse snitch. Coerced confession. Insufficient defense. Tunnel vision of investigators. Confirmation bias. And much more, all privileged by taking a hardened adversarialist approach.
Once convicted, it can be next to impossible to reverse a miscarriage of justice. The prosecutor holds all the cards, and often resists reviewing and reversing wrongful convictions like when trying to maintain their high conviction rate.
Innocence litigators work within this system. Their job and career depend upon them playing along with this adversarial paradigm. They too can fall prey to its built-in biases.
The volume of viable claims of innocence overwhelms the meager resources of innocence projects to review them all. Many local innocence projects favor cases they can envision being easier to reverse the faulty conviction in court. If your viable claim of innocence is not one of these low hanging fruit, you could languish in prison or worse for decades.
Each innocence project screens claims according to a tight set of criteria. For example, some only review cases where DNA evidence can be accessed. Not every innocence claim involves DNA. When it does, the sample may be lost or too degrated for testing. In short, thousands of innocent people languish in prison, and after prison remain trapped without all of their rights, simply because we as a society put all of our eggs into the adersarialist basket.
If operating under the same paradigm as the adversarial legal system, then the wrongly convicted innocent could accuse all those complicitly supporting such adversarialism. They could indict all toxic adversarialists for ripping society apart—both with the judiciary and with polarizing politics. Having tasted the poison of toxic legalism, the wrongly convicted innocent understandably yearn for something better.
Need-response presents itself as a viable alternative. It replaces failing adversarialism with love-nurturing mutuality. Instead of objectifying individuals according to impersonal laws, it prioritizes the needs for which laws arguably exist to serve. Instead of offering relief from the pain of violence, it aims to remove cause for pain by resolving needs on all sides to any conflict. It heralds the higher standard of love, of honoring the needs of others as one's own.
Here are just some of the reasons to be discouraged, disenchanted and disillusioned with the Innocence Project, and with the wider innocence movement. "Here are some common pain points felt by those disillusioned with the innocence movement” according to ChatGPT. Then check how need-response can be the answer.
“Those disillusioned with the innocence movement often cite [these] pain points.”
1.1 Misplaced Resources
“Critics argue that the focus on innocence over broader criminal justice reform draws resources and attention away from addressing systemic issues, such as wrongful convictions due to procedural errors, poor representation, or prosecutorial misconduct—even when defendants aren't strictly ‘innocent’."
Need-response takes a more holistic view of our underserved justice and other needs.
Need-response addresses the structural glitches that not only repeatedly produce wrongful convictions, but fails to address the inflexible needs of all adjudicated persons. It challenges the legitimacy of the adversarial criminal judicial system that objectifies and depersonalizes human beings ostensibly for public order but also for its own institutional gain. The wrongly convicted innocent sits at the tip of the iceberg of what anankelogy identifies as toxic legalism, which rarely helps crime victims to resolve their needs. Instead of serving the law as proxy for societal needs, need-response prioritizes those inflexible needs, recognizing how social order can then nobly fall naturally into place and result in improved wellness for all.
1.2 Exclusion of Non-Innocent Defendants
“There is frustration that the movement largely focuses on individuals who are completely exonerated, leaving those who may have received unfair trials or disproportionately harsh sentences without advocacy.”
Need-response challenges public misconceptions about prisoners.
Need-response cites research estimating rates of wrongful convictions, which suggests that current exonerations barely skim the surface of this overlooked tragedy. While lauding support for exonerees, need-response sheds light on the scope of the problem if all wrongly convicted souls were suddenly released without adequate supports. Need-response debunks the popular misconception that all prisoners claim innocence—they don’t. When grieving the loss of their freedom when first arrested, they naturally go through shock and denial. Their defense lawyer will encourage them to deny the harshest charges to save space for a plea deal. But once they land in prison, most admit to the harm they regrettably caused. Only about 15% assert actual innocence, close to some estimated rates of wrongful conviction. Most prisoners rightly complain how their harsh sentences tend to serve the questionable interests of those invested in penal structures more than the societal interests of justice.
1.3 Pressure to Prove Complete Innocence
“Requiring defendants to meet a high bar of absolute innocence can overlook those with complex cases where errors in their trials might have impacted verdicts, but conclusive exoneration is challenging to prove.”
Need-response questions the innocence of any legal process impeding justice needs.
Need-response provides wrongful conviction claimants with a form they can fill out that correlates their case to those already exonerated. Instead of relying on the judicial guilt-innocence binary, the form automatically estimates a degree of viability for the claimant’s case. If not effectively utilized by the legal process, need-response publicizes the case outside of the adversarial guilt-innocence binary process. Then challenges the legitimacy of any judicial official—including innocence denying prosecutors—who resists this empirically based path toward just outcomes. This can include suspension of funding revenue, as it becomes unethical for officials to coerce taxpayers to fund their empirically evil actions.
1.4 Selective Advocacy
“Some believe that the innocence movement’s ‘narrative-driven’ approach—prioritizing cases that appeal to public sympathy or that make for compelling media—creates inequality, as it often overlooks cases that may not be as sensational.”
Need-response seeks to craft a compelling narrative for each unexonerated innocent.
Need-response seeks to utilize artificial intelligence to craft a compelling narrative for each viable case of wrongful conviction. And potentially for any adjudicated case with questionable outcomes. Need-response prioritizes inflexible needs over arbitrary laws. Including the neglected justice needs of all overlooked by an impersonal legal system or media system improperly incentivized to champion some cases but not all. In the process, need-response creates a narrative for how judicial officials can better serve overlooked justice needs to earn legitimacy, or risk losing the legitimacy to be trusted to serve their communities.
1.5 Influence on Public Perception
“By focusing on wrongful convictions only in clear cases of innocence, the movement may reinforce the misconception that errors in the system are rare or that most people in prison are guilty, despite evidence of broader flaws.”
Need-response illuminates the problems baked into the adversarial judicial approach.
Need-response invites innocence claimants to fill out a copy of the Estimated Innocence Form and post the results online. Eventually, need-response may provide space to spotlight these viable innocence cases. Publicizing these cases outside of lawyer-led entities can move us beyond the popular bias that ignores the commonality of wrongful convictions. These cases can reinforce available research estimating up to hundreds of thousands of wrongful convictions. Illuminating this problem can help the public appreciate how the overlooked magnitude of this problem of toxic legalism equally threatens them. Set in the larger populous frame challenging elite narratives, need-response challenges responsible leaders to help transform social structures currently enabling repeated errors. They earn greater legitimacy the more they can inspire greater personal and collective responsiveness to everyone’s over-adjudicated needs.
1.6 Neglect of Broader Criminal Justice Reforms
“Some argue that a narrow focus on innocence overshadows issues like mass incarceration, racial disparities, and prison reform, which impact a broader group of defendants who may not be innocent but face deeply unjust circumstances.”
Need-response includes the needs of all negatively impacted by failed adversarialism.
Need-response addresses the structural glitches that not only repeatedly produce wrongful convictions, but fails to address the inflexible needs of all adjudicated persons. It challenges the legitimacy of the adversarial criminal judicial system that objectifies and depersonalizes human beings, ostensibly for public order but also for its own institutional gain. The wrongly convicted innocent sits at the tip of the iceberg of what anankelogy identifies as toxic legalism, which rarely helps crime victims to resolve their needs. Focusing on inflexible needs unpacks the problems fueling mass incarceration, racial disparities, and other contributors to poor justice outcomes of both defendants and accusers. Instead of serving the law as a trusted proxy for societal needs, need-response prioritizes those inflexible needs. It recognizes how social order can then fall naturally into place and result in improved wellness for all.
1.7 Limited Systemic Change
“There is a perception that the innocence movement often pursues individual exonerations without pushing as strongly for systemic policy changes, which limits its long-term impact on preventing future wrongful convictions.”
Need-response puts individual cases in context of systemic problems to fix.
Need-response holds public judicial officials accountable to just outcomes. It sets a standard higher than law: improved wellness outcomes of all. Convicting violent individuals is not enough; address the internal and external contributors to violence. Punishment is insufficient; support all to resolve their unmet needs to nullify cause for desperate acts of violence. Along the way, need-response supports transformative changes like innocence commissions and any other systemic adjustment to get to the core of problems that legal systems of adversarial justice and divisive politics are not effectively equipped to address. Until the rates of wrongful convictions measurably declines from independent observation, the personal and professional legitimacy of each judicial official shall steadily decline.
1.8 Moral Judgments
“The emphasis on ‘innocent’ defendants can imply a moral hierarchy, placing the value of innocence above principles like fair treatment, just trials, or proportional sentencing, which may alienate those who advocate for these broader principles.”
Need-response asserts the objective morality of inflexible needs over flexible laws.
Need-response heralds the higher standard of properly resolving everyone’s inflexible needs. Exonerating the innocent is not the end but rather the first step in resolving deeper problems embedded in the legalistic criminal judicial system. Wrongly convicted myself, I quickly recognized how my innocence couldn’t alienate me from fellow prisoners with questionable cases of their own. For example, the guy serving a life sentence for a murder committed by another he barely knew, who was granted a lighter sentence for serving as a witness against him. Need-response applies a higher standard. The more resistant to this higher standard of measurable morality, the more such judicial officials paint themselves into a corner as just another set of self-righteous self-serving offenders. It is now easier for the accused to admit their human errors than for police and prosecutors to admit theirs.
“The innocence movement, aimed at exonerating wrongly convicted individuals, has had major successes in reversing wrongful convictions and reforming aspects of the justice system. However, some supporters and former advocates have expressed disillusionment with the movement, citing various pain points. Here are some of the primary issues and frustrations often mentioned.”
2.01 Narrow Focus on Actual Innocence
“Some feel the innocence movement focuses too narrowly on cases where individuals are clearly innocent, often neglecting cases with legal or procedural errors that don't definitively establish innocence but may still merit exoneration.”
Need-response addresses all inflexible needs impacted by failed adversarialism.
Need-response covers all power relations within and outside the adversarial judicial process. It challenges the ingrained shortcomings of its legalistic approach, which often neglects the needs that laws exist to serve. And it puts all on equal footing for impactful actions that objectively damages other’s lives. Instead of narrowly focusing on the social construct of “crime”, all acts of violence are addressed—especially those privileged by law. Including the violence of prosecutors abusing the state’s exclusive claim to violence. Those seeking exoneration but denied for technical reasons can point to the damaging violence of the process failing to serve the empirically measurable interests of justice. Which need-response links to resolving needs without hindering others from resolving theirs. After addressing legal exonerations, need-response addresses excessively harsh sentences and other unjust outcomes of an impersonal legal process failing to resolve the public’s justice needs. The more the legal process hinders resolving justice needs of anyone, the more need-response challenges its legitimacy and presents a viable alternative. Failure to pursue in good faith a just alternative could spell the end of the legalistic adversarial justice approach as we now know it.
2.02 Lack of Attention to Broader Criminal Justice Reform
“Critics argue that the movement sometimes misses the bigger picture, focusing on individual cases rather than addressing systemic issues such as police misconduct, prosecutorial overreach, racial bias, or sentencing disparities.”
Need-response addresses both the big picture and the many details shaping it.
Need-response prioritizes psychosocial wellness, which integrates internal and external impacts on wellbeing. It links individual changes with systemic societal changes. Rather than seeking legal reforms that risk perpetuating the familiar problematic legalism, need-response gets to the core of the needs that laws exist to serve. It incentivizes us to shift from relying upon legal structures to mutually engage each other’s affected needs. In other words, a marriage between the big picture and the minutia shaping that scene. The more effectively we resolve each other’s needs, systemic problems can naturally take care of themselves.
2.03 Resource Allocation and Prioritization
“Since resources are limited, only certain cases are taken on, often the ones most likely to succeed in court. This leaves many who might have strong claims of innocence without any help, which some advocates feel is unfair and limits the movement's reach.”
Need-response automatically calculates the viability of all claims of innocence.
Need-response aims to publicize all cases of injustice adjudicated in the name of justice. Along the way, it may expose the adversarial approach as a systemic failure. This starts with all innocence claimants posting a summary of their case to our platform. Claimants fill out a form that automatically calculates the viability of their innocence by comparing their case to those already exonerated. It generates a number pointing to the viability of the innocence claim. The innocence movement can use such data to attract resources to process far more cases. Claimants then defy stereotypes by identifying their respect for the needs of any accuser, and even show empathy for errant law enforcement. The public can then realize how easier it is for the falsely accused to admit to their imperfections than for law enforcement institutions and lawyers to admit to theirs. If the slow-motion legal process cannot keep pace with the need for just outcomes, need-response may step in to challenge their legitimacy as the only provider for just outcomes.
2.04 Dependency on New Evidence or DNA Testing
“Many wrongful convictions don’t involve DNA evidence, yet DNA has become a primary tool in innocence cases. Critics argue that this emphasis marginalizes cases where DNA isn't available or relevant, making it harder to address other types of wrongful convictions.”
Need-response examines all wrongful convictions along with incentives to deny them.
Need-response addresses all cases of manifest injustice in the name of justice. While appreciating how exculpatory DNA evidence initiated the innocence movement, need-response takes this shift to scientific accountability to a much greater level. It exposes the adversarial legal system’s many self-serving biases that the scientific method exists to check. Instead of going down the rabbit hole of what best serves institutions of law, need-response process cases to accountably resolve all justice needs. Rather than rely upon a handful of investigators to review a handful of low-hanging-fruit cases to possibly find something to reverse a conviction in some impersonal court of law, need-response challenges the judiciary’s legitimacy to stonewall any case with an estimated score of likely innocence. Need-response checks all violence. Those who personally and professionally benefit from the massive violence of unprocessed wrongful convictions risk being exposed as far worse than hated criminals. Criminals hurt a few people; these institutionalists who repeatedly fail to deliver just outcomes hurt all of society, much the way terrorists do.
2.05 Challenges in Securing Post-Release Support
“After exoneration, many individuals struggle with reintegration, dealing with trauma, finding employment, and housing, often with limited support from the innocence organizations. The lack of post-release assistance leaves many exonerated individuals in difficult situations, especially without access to reparations.”
Need-response unpacks the legally privileged barriers to serve underserved needs.
Need-response addresses all needs affected by the impersonal legal process. Need-responders can support growing efforts to better serve exonerees. But also address the overlooked needs of wrongly convicted innocents released from custody and prevented from fair housing and meaningful employment due to an unexonerated wrongful conviction. They too require integration, processing trauma, securing employment and housing, and more. And they’re denied any prospect for compensation. Need-response illuminates the full scale of not only this problem, but every social and personal problem provoked by toxic legalism. By directly serving the needs laws exist to serve, but legal institutions routinely fail to deliver, need-response aims to improve the wellness of all involved. And challenged the legitimacy of any person or institution failing to keep pace with such positive outcomes.
2.06 Difficulty Addressing Systemic Police and Prosecutorial Misconduct
“Some feel that the movement doesn't do enough to hold law enforcement or prosecutors accountable for misconduct, as organizations may avoid directly antagonizing these powerful institutions to maintain cooperation for future cases.”
Need-response incentivizes adversarial law enforcement to improve quality.
Need-response sits outside the adversarial legal process. Need-responders generally lack the implicit conflict of interest stifling innocence lawyers. Need-response incentivizes law enforcement officials and prosecutors to shift from an adversarial relation to a mutual relation. We affirm each other’s inflexible needs. We affirm the recognizable needs of both accused and accusers. We hold all accountable to measurable wellness improvements. With this higher standard of mutual regard, need-response can address the mission creep of judicial institutions that pulls it away from prioritizing justice needs to prioritize serving itself. The more need-response can produce wellness improvements by enabling more needs to resolve, the less the public can be manipulated to trust that our legal system is doing all that it can. It can do better, and it must. Or we may have to hold all revenue sources accountable to the poor outcomes that they passively fund. We can all work together to nurture our institutions to be more accountably responsive to our many inflexible needs.
2.07 Media-Driven Perception and Sensationalism
“High-profile innocence cases often drive public perception, but they sometimes don’t reflect the average wrongful conviction case. Critics say this sensationalized approach may create an overly optimistic view of the process, misleading the public on how common wrongful convictions are and how hard they are to overturn.”
Need-response exposes the magnitude of the problem of wrongful convictions.
Need-response aims to publicize on our platform all viable innocence claims. Anyone can download the Estimated Innocence Form, fill it out and upload it for this purpose. There could be tens of thousands of these unexonerated with compelling innocence claims. Each profile could provide a picture of the claimant, a one-line summary of their compelling claim, along with some key highlights and other helpful info. Most importantly, each profile would feature the viability score from their “Estimated Innocence Report” from the uploaded form. Anyone agreeing to the site’s Terms of Use can view these profiles in more detail. Most cases likely include the many roadblocks toward judicial review, including the reluctance of under-resourced innocence projects declining to provide legal help. Each case could be summarized in an AI-generated video short. Media outlets could use these to inform the public of the massive scope of this underreported problem. Or risk getting accused of being complicitly silent about it.
2.08 Psychological Toll on Advocates and Supporters
“Those who work on innocence cases often experience secondary trauma from exposure to the details of wrongful convictions and the trauma of exonerated individuals. This emotional burden can lead to burnout, disillusionment, and feelings of helplessness, especially when facing slow progress and systemic resistance.”
Need-response spreads the effort to a support team independent of adversarialism.
Need-response operates as a mutual support network. Cases get reviewed collectively instead of individually, providing mutual support for processing any traumatizing details. Not only for those processing such cases, but also for the claimants having to revisit such details. This process mitigates emotional hazards by offering an alternative to the very system at the source of the harm. Instead of bending the knee to the court’s failed adversarial approach, need-response authorizes the higher standard of addressing all the affected needs for which authority exists to serve. Any viable case of innocence not successfully litigated impeaches the legitimacy of the sluggish adversarial judicial process. The more innocence activists feel frustrated by systemic resistance, the more drawn to go above and beyond this toxic legalism to identify and resolve overlooked justice needs. By any legitimate means necessary.
2.09 Emphasis on "Perfect Victims" for Exoneration
“Some feel there is a bias towards clients who fit a specific narrative or image that is easier to ‘sell’ to courts, the media, and the public, which can leave out individuals with complicated pasts or cases that are less straightforward.”
Need-response shifts the narrative to expose how the legal system threatens us all.
Need-response shifts the emphasis from individual cases to the sheer volume of cases. While some individual cases may grab an audience easier than others, the mass number of overlooked cases serves as a clarion call in itself. Including cases of relatable human drama. For example, a case where a desperate act led to calling the police, arresting someone accused of stealing something not stolen, ignoring conciliatory options, coercing a false confession resulting in a wrongful conviction, satisfying the conviction count of a local prosecutor, and innocent young children no longer seeing their father except for the occasional prison visit and who no longer trust such biased authorities. Need-response identifies distorting biases built into the adversarial process of not only the judiciary but also of politics and media. Conflict sells, attracts views, get clicks, but rarely leads to solving conflicts. Need-response identifies and addresses the unmet needs resulting in each conflict. The old paradigm for entertaining battles features interpersonal struggles. Need-response offers a new engaging paradigm that pits our unresolved needs against the impersonal social systems that trap us in despairing pain. This new paradigm could offer competitive advantage to media outlets struggling to stay relevant to the public’s needs.
2.10 Slow Pace of Legal Reform
“Despite high-profile exonerations, legal reforms to prevent wrongful convictions are often slow and uneven across jurisdictions, leading to frustration among advocates who see the same types of errors and injustices occurring repeatedly.”
Need-response competes with the legal process to improve wellness outcomes.
Need-response challenges the adversarial politics on par with adversarial justice: to shift from trying to win at another’s expense to trying to forge a win-win solution. To segue from trying to ease own pain to enable all sides to resolve needs, to remove cause for pain. To replace coping with poor consequences with improvement of each other’s wellness. Such a higher standard requires more discipline than adversarial systems. We delay gratifying victories in order to resolve needs. The higher standard conditions professional legitimacy, along with public funding revenue, to improve wellness outcomes by resolving more justice needs. Need-response holds authorities accountable to just outcomes by daring to put our tax liabilities into an escrow account, and releasing it automatically upon an independent demonstration of good faith response to such needs. To put it bluntly, we must not fund evil that stubbornly blocks the good. Improved wellness from resolved needs remains the bottom line. We echo the sentiment ingrained in the U.S. Declaration of Independence: to improve wellness outcomes by resolving underserved justice needs, we pledge our lives.
2.11 Internal Movement Challenges and Fragmentation
“As the movement grows, critics say it can feel fragmented, with competing organizations, differing philosophies, and struggles over funding or recognition, which can detract from the unified mission of justice and fairness.”
Need-response inspires community by prioritizing each other’s needs over laws.
Need-response counters the divisiveness now rampant in modern society. Need-responders learn to build bridges and develop coalitions to serve underserved needs. As a profession replacing adversarialism with mutual regard, it incentivizes cooperation over competition. With its unique revenue generating model, it is less vulnerably dependent on foundations or other public funding sources. Need-responders earn recognition, and added pay, by measurably improving the wellness level of clients. Moreover, the bottom line of improved wellness outcomes of all has a way or anchoring each other to the same cause, to the same unified pursuit. This alone has a strange way of checking mission creep, to keep all focused on delivering outcomes that prioritizes underserved justice needs.
2.12 Entrenched Social Structures
“These pain points often stem from the deep complexities of addressing wrongful convictions within the legal system, but they also reflect the broader challenges inherent in any reform movement working to shift entrenched structures.”
Need-response aims to transform social structures to be more responsive to us all.
Need-response offers a refreshing alternative to the built-in traps of adversarial justice. Rather than prioritizing laws, need-response prioritizes the needs that laws exist to serve. That includes the need to exonerate every wrongly convicted innocent person with or without the help of the law. While no one sits above the law, no law sits above the needs it exists to serve. And anyone or any entity trying to put laws or authority above inflexible needs expose themselves as a dangerous threat far worse than the average criminal. These “legalists” provoke plenty of disillusionment with the legal process, including the innocence movement. Need-response recognizes this as a structural problem fueled by all those too close to the problems to realize the damage they cause. Need-response identifies and redresses each of these common pain points to outperform the judicial system in serving our underserved justice needs. It incentivizes emerging leaders to change not merely individuals or laws but to transform constraining social norms with the power of love.
Need-response to the rescue
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.
1) Estimated Innocence
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.
Synopsis
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.
Highlights
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
Tagline
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.
2) Responsive Innocence
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.
1. Empathize with what the complainant actually needed at the time
"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."
2. Identify your own affected needs from the incident.
"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."
3. How would you address complainant’s apparent needs if you had the chance?
"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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