Open letter to innocence litigators

Welcome to need-response as an alternative to the limits of adversarial law.

When the last line of hope offers little to no hope, where can the innocent turn?

Executive Summary [TLDR]

Many who are a wrongly convicted innocent, or whose loved one is a wrongly convicted innocent, appreciate the innocence movement. Many with viable claims of innocence are still getting passed over, and these are understandably more disillusioned with the innocence movement. Welcome to need-response and its exoneration services, as the next line of hope for the "unexonerated".

Thank you for your dedication

As a wrongly convicted innocent person, I am grateful for the innocence movement. I am thankful to you and to others for helping to keep hope alive.

However, my requests for help over time have been turned down at least four times. I was told at the time that they:

1.  Can only serve death row inmates.

2.  Can only serve lifers.

3.  Can only serve those serving long prison sentences.

4.  Cannot find a reasonable path in court to reverse conviction with untested DNA.

Consequently,

I am an asexual trans person who remains stuck on the sex offender registry for life, for a crime that never occurred.

Despite earning multiple degrees, I remain under-housed and underemployed.

I am not alone in feeling disappointed and even discouraged by the lack of responsiveness from various innocence projects and conviction integrity units. Discouragement begets disillusionment. Which costs you legitimacy in the eyes of countless innocents in prison and beyond. Along with their devastated loved ones. You must realize how countless innocent persons in prison remain underserved by the legal process.

Does innocence even matter? I place this distrust less on the people within the innocence movement dedicating their lives to right the wrongs, and not even necessarily on local prosecutors stalling on correcting these injustices, but squarely on the distorting effects of the adversarial process built into the judiciary.

In other words, wrongful convictions of the innocent stem mostly from a structural problem. The adversarial approach is most necessary for law enforcement to incapacitate a violent offender. Once disarmed and held in custody, the exclusive application of adversarialism fades.

When left in overdrive, it needlessly provokes all adjudicated parties into mutual defensiveness and diminished awareness of each other’s affected needs. Until those needs can resolve, problems persist. Instead of resolving our justice needs, and despite the best of intentions, an exclusively adversarial legal approach risks perpetuating injustice in the name of justice. Where justice costs much, injustice can run cheap.

Any injustice in name of justice is no justice at all.

This insight comes from anankelogy, the new social science for understanding our needs like never before. Anankelogy recognizes our laws flexibly exist to serve our inflexible needs. Only by resolving our inflexible needs can we return to full functioning capacity and reliably respect laws for respecting each other’s needs. Need-response can help you to better serve the needs our laws exist to serve.

Need-response is a proposed new professional service to directly address, and eventually resolve, each other’s affected needs. The more our needs resolve, the less we suffer pain. The less pain suffered, the easier it is to sustain prosocial behavior.

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Need-response raises the standard above myopic legalism and defensive-provoking adversarialism. It holds procedural justice empirically accountable to outcomes of substantive justice.

Need-response offers innocence claimants an attractive alternative to the opaque re-adjudication process relied upon by trained lawyers. The wrongly convicted innocent can now prove their innocence without you.

First, they can download our case form to identify factors correlating with exonerated cases. You can download your copy for review. This exists as a grassroots project, to instill a level of accountability currently in the legal profession’s top-down systems.

Second, if still dissatisfied with the failings of the adversarial process, they can pivot to our mutuality process. They can try our public exoneration process. They pursue both in parallel, to see which is the most responsive to their inflexible needs.

Lastly, they have the option to primarily pursue such a public exoneration process. They prioritize this mutual regard alternative, and dare the adversarialists to keep up. If finally exonerated by a court of law, fine. But we can no longer wait: Justice delayed is justice denied.

We must serve the inflexible needs of all, especially the vulnerable systemically overlooked by impersonal institutions. We must put their inflexible needs ahead of the flexible practices of such institutions, when they are found to misappropriate their authority to indulge themselves at the public’s expense.

For example, need-response assesses if any assertion of “conviction finality” accountably serves the public interest of securing closure for crime victims, or if it actually serves the institutions’ or prosecutor’s preference to evade dealing with, or correcting, its damaging errors. The same could be applied to legal fictions like “harmless error” divorced from measurably illicit results.

You are welcome to participate in this pioneering alternative. We already published an open letter to all judicial officials to transparently convey our good faith intent to properly resolve needs that laws ostensibly exist to serve.

As we shift from adversarialism to mutual regard, we hold ourselvces to a higher standard. We stary by asking you what you may need from us. We seek to remain engaged. But will not allow a lack of engagement to slow us down to properly resolve needs.

We have a “with you or without you approach” that prioritizes inflexible needs over flexible laws. We put vulnerable people over unresponsive institutions. We prioritize wellness outcomes of all with intrinsic motivation over maintaining the social order with extrinsic motivators. Impacred wellness outcomes is our bottom line. We prioritize love over fear.

Learn more about these need-responsive “exoneration services” at the Anankelogy Foundation. Follow their development on our Need-Response podcast. Each Wednesday, hear how we apply this scientific understanding of needs to our underserved need for justice. And how you can play an active role in improving the lives of us all.

Respectfully.

Steph Turner

Founder of anankelogy and founder of need-response

ADDENDA

The content below sent in our open letter to all judicial officials may aptly apply to you.

Need-response can complement law enforcement’s adversarialism, in ways not normally contemplated by ADR or arbitration options. It can illuminate the biases that adversarialism often impose. Moreover, it can potentially produce more just results by incentivizing those in a conflict to first exhaust all possible mutuality options.

We do not presume adjudicated individuals, either complainants or defendants, as oppositional. We first affirm their inflexible needs that cannot be changed. Then we address the improper ways they behaved to redress such needs.

We cast a broader net to explore both internal factors and external factors shaping their options. We stay clear of either extreme: victimhood (overemphasizing external factors) or hyper-responsibility (overemphasizing internal factors). We hold ourselves accountable to produce just outcomes, in ways rarely if ever seen in the judicial process.

No longer exclusive

The high volume of unsolved crimes, along with underreported violence, countered by estimated high rates of wrongly convicted innocents, suggests you could use a fresh approach to serving our justice needs. One less tied to the imposing constraints of adversarialism, and less beholden to constructs of law not held accountable to empirically measurable outcomes. In other words, prioritizing substantive justice over procedural justice.

To serve this noble goal of resolving more justice needs, need-response asserts a radical claim:

Anyone in the adversarial judicial system has the 

privilege and not the exclusive right

to serve the justice needs of the people. 

In the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Jefferson hints to this necessity for an alternative when a government slips into tyrannical tendencies, or worse.

"All experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

In other words, creeping normalcy coerces us to adjust to institutions creeping from their mission to serve the people in a just democratic society. Without any other option, the people acclimate to the mounting pain of their unresolved justice needs.

As the sole institution available to the public to address their justice needs, the adversarial justice system receives little incentive to improve outcomes. True to the American adventure of competition, need-response now presents itself as the incentivizing market force to improve just outcomes.

Opening a new path to resolve persisting needs

In contrast to Jefferson’s rhetoric, need-response does not seek to abolish the current forms of the judiciary, but instead to complement it, and where necessary to compete with it, to identify, address and resolve justice needs.

We invite you to learn with us how to utilize need-response to better fulfill your mission to serve justice needs. You can partner with us, as we extend a warm welcome to support a client’s noble wellness goal. One client at a time.

	Status quo institution	Need-response alternative
Justice means	procedural; process focused	substantive; results focused
Approach	adversarial; win-lose approach	mutuality; win-win approach
Service	serve flexible laws & powers	serve inflexible needs
Offer	relieve pain of survivors	remove pain by resolving needs
Responsibility focus	risk objectifying individuals	psychosocial balance
Legitimacy	ascribed; coax public trust	earned; earn public trust
Aim	maintain social order	improve overall wellness
Perspective	myopic; reductive to what’s manageable	holistic; attentive to all
Manifest outcomes	toxic legalism; poor need orientations	social love; improved need orientations

Or you can drag your feet, delay your response, resist our intent, and even oppose our efforts. All under color of law. But we must address inflexible justice needs, with you or without you. And let the people democratically decide which they prefer. But the reality of inflexible needs is never legitimately up for any vote or court opinion.

Let us help you resolve justice needs

Resisting inflexible needs is never an option. Those who do under color of law become professionally and personally complicit in the rising number of poor wellness outcomes, like major depression, severe anxiety, recurring addictions, and deaths of despair. Need-response offers such officials an off-ramp from such damaging objectification.

Instead of always processing a mounting pile of troubling cases, need-response can potentially reduce that load as it cultivates greater responsiveness to the inflexible needs spilling into violent incidents. Need-response aims to get to the source of our problems, which points to our persisting unresolved needs. You can either be a part of this fresh alternative, or see how it helps others improve their lives and their careers.

Any injustice in the name of justice

We start with viable claims of innocence that can be independently verified. We investigate the biases of judicial officials, starting with prosecutors, who delay justice more for their own purposes than the public interest for a just society. We methodically explore limitations within the adversarial legal process, but not in an adversarial way.

We invite the wrongly convicted with a viable innocence claim to correlate their case with those already exonerated. We calculate the degree of their likely innocence instead of imposing a black-and-white guilt or innocence category. In other words, we aim to improve identifying the wrongly convicted innocent with a more scientifically valid process.

In case their estimated innocence fails to provide a timely, just outcome, we offer them the opportunity to demonstrate their responsiveness to all involved in a conflict. We incentivize all to fulfill the purpose of law, which is prosocial behavior toward each other. That includes incentivizing questionable authorities to be equally prosocial.

Inviting you to help shape this pioneering approach

We are testing a radically fresh approach. We link you with a sample of those you impact, so you can improve your effectiveness in enabling them to resolve their justice needs. This provides you the opportunity to improve your legitimacy to serve a wary public.

By offering you sponsorship opportunities, we help you nurture the public’s trust by helping you respond more effectively to their underserved justice needs. Much better than currently possible by applying the law alone.

Learn more…

For a more informed decision, learn more at AnankelogyFoundation.org. Follow us on the Need-Response podcast to keep informed how this new professional field of need-response is taking root and growing.

Let’s grow a better society together by holding each other accountably responsive to each other’s inflexible needs. Let’s incentivize each other to move past adversarial acrimony and impersonal alienation to make room for our untapped potential for more platonic love.

If we don’t, who will?

Respectfully,

The Anankelogy Foundation

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