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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
On your own without depending on others
This assumes you have already have a copy of the Estimated Innocence Form and have completed it. If not, you will need to download a copy first and fill it out. Then transfer the basic elements here:
1) Claimant's first name.
2) Claimant's last name.
3) Claimant's estimated innocence score.
4) Verification process score.
5) Tagline.
6) Brief synopsis.
Once these are complete, scroll down to the next page to continue the process.
Navigation tips
Use its Table of Contents to quickly go to each page.
Use the header of each page to quickly move through this document.
Click on any page header to return to the Table of Contents.
Click on the left side up-arrow to go to the previous page header.
Click on the right side down-arrow to go to the next page header.
With need-responder guidance in a wellness campaign
The need-responder could help to improve the tagline and brief synopsis. Or offer some affirming feedback, to give their option of what works best in its current wording, and perhaps how it might be improved.
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
On your own without depending on others
Select on of the five options:
1) adversarial only: exclusively pursue the adversarial court process
2) adversarial first: start with court process, introduce need-responsive process
3) parallel: pursue court and need-responsive processes simultaneously
4) mutuality first: start need-responsive process, add court process afterward
5) mutuality only: exclusively pursue our mutuality need-responsive process
Read the summary description. Then consider the pros and cons of this option.
After deciding the best option for your or your wrongly convicted loved one, follow the instructions specific for that option. For added perspective, review the text under "From adversarial justice to mutuality justice". If you find this agreeable, continue onto the next page. Otherwise you can chance to an option more agreeable to your particular needs.
With need-responder guidance in a wellness campaign
We can carefully review how each option could apply to your innocence case. Since this is new and continually evolving, we may discover some things to consider that could not be included in this tool.
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
On your own without depending on others
If still undecided which approach best serves your needs, explore your options further by clicking on this button at the bottom of the page: 7 ways need-responders equalize power relations. Click on each of the seven items to go immediately to that explainer in the blog post.
1. First, we identify power relations impacting your wellbeing.
2. We then unpack common phases in that power relation.
3. We replace the adversarial with a reconciling approach.
4. We replace arbitrary legitimacy with earned trust.
5. We support leaders to transform restrictive social structures.
6. We assert the greater power and authority of love.
7. We refer to available research on power dynamics.
This blog post introduces you to our abbreviated terms of Reporting Impactee (RI) and Ascribed Impactor (AI). Reviewing this article could clear of up some confusion.
In short, a wellness campaign functions best when transitioning from the judiciary's familiar adversarial process to our pioneering mutualizing process.
With need-responder guidance in a wellness campaign
If necessary, the need-responder can give you more inputs into the mutuality approach, to help you anticipate what this fresh approach can mean for your particular innocence claim. The need-responder can also offer more insights on how the wellness program can incentivize prosecutors and other court officials to prefer the benefits of this mutuality alternative. But only if you make it available by including mutuality as an option.
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
On your own without depending on others
This mutuality alternative corrects two main errors inherent in adversarial justice. First, adversarialism pulls you into settling to relieve your pain of unresolved needs, where mutuality seeks to resolve needs to remove cause for pain (manipulating your "easement orientation" away from wellness). Second, adversarialism pulls you into the less healthy defensive stance, where mutuality seeks to mutually resolve each other's unchosen needs (manipulating your "conflict orientation" away from wellness).
1. The avoidance-engagement contrast. This addresses what anankelogy calls an easement orientation.
Adversarialism tends to pull you into the pathology of avoiding the finer details that matter.
Mutuality incentivizes all sides to mutually engage each other's particular needs.
2. The adversarialism-mutualizing contrast. This addresses what anankelogy calls a conflict orientation.
Adversarialism tends to provoke each other's defensiveness, often unnecessarily for the innocent.
Mutuality incentivizes all sides to remain open amidst conflict to more fully address each other's needs.
Both of these contrasting lists could be enough to warrant the mutuality approach over the adversarialist approach. Until this new approach gains tractions, you may understandably prefer to stick with the familiar adversarial judicial process as the only known means for exoneration. But now you can be more informed of the risks to your wellness if depending too heavily on their adversarialism.
With need-responder guidance in a wellness campaign
The need-responder can go into more depths about the risks to your wellbeing when vulnerable to their adversarialist approach. You can eventually introduce our mutuality alternative to innocence litigants and judicial officials as an attractive alternative respecting more of their overlooked needs. That's the powerful potential of a wellness campaign, armed with the power of love.
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
On your own without depending on others
This mutualizing alternative utilizes the positive-negative-positive format of the "praise sandwich".
Positive: Affirm the unchosen needs of the other.
Negative: Report your affected needs in a non-coercive way.
Positive: Indicate how you intend to support both side's unchosen needs.
This alternative to the standard adversarial approach goes a long way to identify and address the needs fueling conflicts. Which in turn reduces or removes cause for pain. Then restores each other's wellness.
1. Empathize with what the complainant actually needed at the time.
See this through the lens of the Golden Rule. Thoughtfully describe the complainant's apparent needs as if you were the complainant being described.
2. Identify your own affected needs from this incident.
Express your unchosen needs affected by the false accusations, wrongful conviction and all that followed.
3. How would you address complainant's needs if you had the chance?
Demonstrate your responsiveness to the affected needs on all sides.
You will apply this later when you proactively engage each other's needs to solve this problem of overlooked innocence (See #10 below.).
With need-responder guidance in a wellness campaign
The need-responder can help guide you to find the words to focus on the unchosen needs. You may have to go through different drafts for each one. Together, you try to get it to read as least reactive and most sympathetic as possible. This may require you to use the need-responder as a sounding board.
This stuff can elicit a lot of old painful emotions. It can be easy to retreat into guarded language. But the more engaging the better. Let's get this to sound as innocent and caring as you actually are.
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
On your own without depending on others
CHALLENGING PROBLEM. Adversarialism expects everyone to stay inside their isolated bubbles. Instead of relating directly with each other's needs, adversarial norms pressure you to rely on impersonal rules. Such 'legalism' normalizes alienation from one another. We now find ourselves immersed in a loneliness epidemic. We defer to legal experts to mediate our interpersonal conflicts. Their adversarialist approach features unchecked confirmation bias to make their mediation process easier for themselves. Problems like wrongful convictions soon abound. Laws rarely show you the best thing to do in every situation.
OPPORTUNE SOLUTION. Mutuality inspires you to engage each other. Instead of relying upon impersonal rules, you relate directly with each other's specific needs. You explore how best to honor each other's oft-overlooked specific needs. Like your neglected need for exoneration and other's underserved need for public safety. You learn to neutralize prejudices that assume such needs are mutually exclusive. While solving the problem of wrongful convictions with your wellness campaign, you also solve problems like alienation and loneliness. You discover how to proactively serve the needs which laws can only passively address. You cultivate wellness in ways adversarial systems never can. You establish a foundation to recognize your innocence and give others the opportunity to do justice or risk being left behind in the dust.
Your problem solving adventure starts with a free warmup exercise. You list those you know and offer each a simple act of kindness, to serve some need they have. This orients you to this mutuality alternative of a wellness campaign. You learn to reorient others from "reactive adversarialism" to "responsive mutuality" in five phases.
0. Wellness warmup: Assess if this alternative is a good fit for you. Then see how responsive your friends are to your responsiveness to their expressed need. See if you can attract enough support to trust your upcoming wellness campaign can become a success. You invite each to "follow" your revolutionary new way to address underserved needs like exoneration. It's always free for them to follow your campaign.
1. BASE phase: Assess your beginning point. Address any personal matters to earn the trust of others. Expand your ability to endure the natural discomforts of resolving needs. Improve your ability to remain open and nondefensive when in a conflict.
2. ALLY phase: Find a trustworthy partner to help create a solid foundation for your campaign. For claimants still incarcerated, this ALLY serves as the proxy on your behalf. You grant them the equivalent of a "power of attorney" to lead your wellness campaign in ways you cannot. You retain the right to suspend this proxy relation if you find them acting in bad faith or unreliable to continue.
3. TEAM phase: You reach out to your peers. You start with those you served in your warmup exercise. You invite those following for free to upgrade to monthly paid support. You incentivize them by sharing the benefits of becoming more actively supportive. Their investment enables them to become qualified need-responders. They gains the tools to effectively speak truth to power in their lives. Their own needs resolve more as they help you resolve your need for exoneration.
4. GROW phase: You start inviting powerholders to your campaign. You bring on board innocence litigators and sympathetic media outlets. You welcome your defense counsel and appellate attorneys. You incentivize the most supportive of these, just as you did with your peers, to upgrade to monthly invested support. You attract them to this more responsive mutuality alternative to resolve needs. You introduce the benefits of earned legitimacy, grounded in actual wellness outcomes. You grow support for exoneration.
5. GOAL phase: You step up your campaign to connect with the powerholders with the most impact on your wrongful conviction. With encouragement from your growing team, you invite the district attorney to revisit your viable innocence claim. You deny them their usual dismissive denial by presenting this not as their familiar adversarial win-lose option but as an opportunity to serve, as Berger v. U.S. compels, the interests of justice. You hold them accountable, with support from your support team, to earn their legitimacy by demonstrating just outcomes grounded not in their self-serving biases but in measurable wellness outcomes of those in the public (including yourself) that they are commissioned to serve.
Innocence denial presents as an overlooked problem. Prosecutors' motivated reasoning may blind them from the scope of the problem. To help appreciate the devastating scope of the problem, take some time to review the range of academically estimated rates of wrongful convictions [PDF].
The more your campaign gains traction to successfully address this problem, then your campaign could shift from a "wellness case" type to a "wellness project" type that helps others in the same boat. You are not alone, and there's is much we can do when coming together to solve this problem in a nonadversarial way.
With need-responder guidance in a wellness campaign
Every innocence claimant case is different. Your need-responder can match the particulars of this wellness campaign to fit your unique situation as best as we can. For those claimants still incarcerated, we recommend you find a trusted ALLY to serve as your campaign's proxy on your behalf.
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
On your own without depending on others
Public revenue sources rely heavily upon impact data or feedback data. This point was driven home when earning my MPA (Masters of Public Administration) a decade ago. Public coffers must be ready to give a thorough account for how they spend the taxpayers' money. By shifting to a mutuality approach, we can work this toward your advantage.
Instead of waiting for them to ask you the public how they're doing, need-response tells them first. Instead of answering their survey questions for how we perceive their actions, we provide data procured during a wellness campaign for how their actions or inactions actually impact our vulnerable needs. Instead of feeding their easily manipulated "ascribed legitimacy", we raise the bar by calculating their "earned legitimacy" when contributing or hindering you to resolve your unchosen needs. for your ultimately resolved needs.
The more removed from your actual situation, the less these judicial officials can even know what to ask you. They can have the most sincere intent to serve the public's need for justice and yet get it totally wrong. The actual perpetrator remains free to violate others as the judicial system violates you. That can now cost them the legitimacy to continue collecting public revenues to repeatedly create unacceptable outcomes.
Need-response challenges the status quo of what it calls "ascribed legitimacy". Most of us trust authority as legitimate simply because we think it's acceptable, despite its impact on our unchosen needs. A wellness campaign puts you and your support team in the driver seat to monitor what need-response calls "earned legitimacy". Judicial officials, including judges and prosecutors, earn acceptability not by what you think or they think or anyone thinks, but by how well they enable everyone's unchosen needs to resolve.
Ascribed legitimacy: Anankelogy recognizes how current assumptions around accepting an authority is generally divorced from its actual impacts on your needs. Such arbitrary authority stays in power by manipulating your perception of them. The more such authorities can evoke you to fear what life could be without them, the more you're inclined to accept them as legitimate. If we can be honest, this sets a terribly low bar. Such ascribed legitimacy is mostly reactive to feelings and tends towards rationalized constructs that avoids addressing your specific needs.
Earned legitimacy: Anankelogy establishes that your unchosen needs, and the unchosen needs of others, exist as objective fact. While our chosen responses to such needs can come into conflict, the unchosen needs themselves never clash. Your requirement for solitude, for example, exists independent of another's requirement for deep social connection. The conflict arises when they respond to their unchosen need for companionship by choosing to invade your moment of necessary solitude. Responses to unchosen needs include a moral component, but not the fact of the unchosen needs themselves.
This points to an objective foundation for morality. No one can change their root needs to fit what authority expects. The more coerced to fit into authoritarian demands, the more pathologies abound: major depression, addictions, suicide. Authorities can earn the privilege to impact our vulnerable needs the more their efforts can measurably result in
resolving more needs (as indicated by self-assessment and concurrence of need-responder),
removing more pain (as indicated by verifiable decreased addictive behaviors), and
restoring more wellness (as indicated by the need-responder's independent assessment).
Earned legitimacy recognizes authorities do not have full sway on such outcomes. The individual retains agency. But since anankelogy recognizes wellness as psychosocial (in contrast to Western bias of hyper-individualism and reduction of wellness to isolated psychological factors), a wellness campaign looks both inward and outward to better understand each wellness outcome. The more an authority figure's actions to address your unchosen need (i.e., your wellness goal), and the results measurably correlate with your reduced pain and improved wellness, the more they can share credit.
Earned legitimacy is responsive to everyone's needs and is accountably evidence-based. How authority actually impacts your ability to function can be used to estimate its level of legitimacy along five identifiable levels.
violent illegitimacy: officials fully exploit and violate those subjected to its authority to serve its own ends with little to no value to the public. Instead of helping you to resolve your unchosen need, it unnecessarily provokes a need. E.g., A police officer traumatizes you with an arbitrary and hostile stop-and-frisk to merely fill a quota for their supervisor.
substandard legitimacy: officials use their authority to only ease the pain of unresolved needs, which tends to lull us into passive dependence upon them to help cope with the continuing pain of our unresolved needs. Instead of helping you to resolve your unchosen need, it helps to trap you in pain. E.g., You win a court battle at the other's side's expense that only provides you some temporary relief from all you have already lost. You keep going back to try to win more court hearings, which never addresses your unchosen needs or the other side's pain from their underserved unchosen needs.
standard legitimacy: officials address the identifiable needs of all sides in a conflict, applying "mutual regard" to encourage each side to engage each other's unchosen needs. Instead of merely easing the pain of each side's affected needs (which the adversarial system is designed to do), it helps you step outside of your own pain and recognize the pain in others with unresolved needs. This keeps the door open to more full resolve each other's conflict-affected needs. E.g., Both sides of a dispute translate their anger into what they specifically cannot accept from the other, and then take tentative steps to provide something acceptable to each other. E.g., Both sides of a domestic dispute enter into a restorative justice program and learn to better relate to each other's poorly expressed needs.
competitive legitimacy: officials try to respond to your underserved needs more than any other official, which can lead to career advancement by demonstrating far better outcomes. They go from affirming each other's unchosen needs to Instead of merely applying "mutual regard" to a conflict, they inspire "social love" by serving more needs of others as they would have them serve their own. E.g., A lawyer goes out of her way to forgo the adversarial role of attorney to try to serve the needs of the opposing side more than the other side's counsel, and succeeds in resolving the opponent's needs in ways the adversarial system can never anticipate.
exemplary legitimacy: officials identify laws and established practices that get in the way of resolving unchosen needs, to pioneer a path toward fully resolving underserved needs. Instead of passively trusting current norms, such authority seek to transform such offending norms and social structures, to ensure greater responsiveness to everyone's unchosen needs. Stagnant norms get replaced by refreshing practices grounded more in universal principles. Focus shifts from bending to institutional needs to the mission needs for which the institution exists to serve. E.g., Laws are changed to end exploitation of "conviction finality" that ostensibly provides closure to victim-survivors but tends to be used to reduce the case docket at the expense of clearing viable innocence claims.
In sharp contrast to the status quo of ascribed legitimacy, earned legitimacy is tied to measurable wellness outcomes of unchosen needs. A wellness campaign helps authority shift
from
ascribed to earned legitimacy with verifiable impact data,
and
from law-serving reactivity to need-serving responsiveness,
and
from alienating adversarialism to love-inspiring mutuality.
Authorities of every stripe may eventually be assessed as either pro-wellness or anti-wellness. There is little if any room in between. What gets measured gets more readily done. A wellness campaign can incentivize every authority to become more demonstrably pro-wellness. They can now stop telling us what is best; we'll tell them.
With need-responder guidance in a wellness campaign
You understandably may have a load of questions at this point. How does this all apply to your particular wellness campaign? Can you still be exonerated with taking on the whole adversarial paradigm? Is there any hope for exoneration if the whole process reaches no higher than substandard legitimacy as defined here? You are encouraged to explore all of your concerns with your need-responder.
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
On your own without depending on others
A wellness campaign is structured to address each level of a human problem.
personal problem: During the BASE phase, you face and work through problems you can solve on your own. This challenges the widely held assumption that you only need to fix yourself to be alright.
interpersonal problem: During the ALLY phase, you transition from addressing personal problems to addressing problems requiring some cooperation from your peers. You continue to address interpersonal problems during the TEAM phase.
power problem: During the GROW phase, you gain the support to courageously and effectively to speak truth to power to solve problems only those in positions of authority can change.
structural problem: During the final GOAL phase, you ride the momentum to challenge social structures, onerous rules and problematic norms so you can solve problems beyond the scope of individuals, problems solved only making some systemic changes.
Adversarial law presents three structural barriers limiting clearance of wrongful convictions.
1. Overgeneralizing. Laws are kept vague to apply in almost any situation. But this ensures the laws affecting you cannot adequately address your particular situation or specific needs. Details of the false accusation can easily slip through the cracks of a strictly adversarial law approach.
2. Alienating. Laws are kept impersonal to avoid favoritism. But this ensures their application avoids knowing each other's actual needs. Any empathy you have for the complainant gets totally ignored.
3. Hostile. Laws are kept punitive to incentivize compliance. But this ensures their enforcement assumes mostly or only external pressures incentivizes compliance. Any intrinsic motive you have to honor the needs of the complainant, and others in the the public, gets summarily sidelined.
Because of the onerous structure of the adversarial process, both sides in any adjudicated conflict tend to remain locked in pain from their underserved justice needs. The adversarial system (in both politics and the judiciary) merely offers some pain relief to the winning side in a conflict involving law. Rarely does a judicial or political outcome enable you to fully resolve an affected need, to remove cause for pain, in order to restore you to full wellness.
While they usually mean well, those working within the adversarialist structure may actually perpetuate your pain by denying you opportunity to fully resolve your affected needs. While loaded down in pain, you cannot effectively solve your personal problems or interpersonal problems. You feel yourself increasingly powerless to address or even recognize power problems. You likely dismiss structural problems as merely political, which itself has become a structural problem of dysfunctional adversarialism.
Motivated reasoning can prevent judicial officials, like prosecutors, to recognize their complicity in your pain. Illuminating their role raises all kinds of ethical perils they understandably prefer not to face. If you're heavily dependent upon the adversarialist paradigm, you too may be blind to its role in keeping you trapped in pain. As individualists raised in the West, we generally assume it's easier to change the individual to fit social structures than to change social structures to fit the individual. Need-response seeks to change anything in the way of resolving the objective fact of everyone's unchosen needs. Our personal and collective wellness depends on it.
A wellness campaign can hold all judicial officials accountable for their culpability in preventing the resolution of our justice needs. They are both personally and professionally culpable. As soon as they recognize and admit their profession forces them into imposing such structural limits, while they support your compelling innocence claim, they can shift from personal culpability to only professional culpability. Until their profession transforms into something creating need-resolving results, they remain professionally culpable for denying you exoneration.
Where do you see yourself now along this adversarialist-mutualizing spectrum? The more you are ready to transition out of adversarialism and into a mutuality paradigm, the better a wellness campaign can be right for you. Consider where you fit along the adoption curve when deciding if this challenge to help create structural improvements is right for you or not.
1. Hard adversarialist: strictly pits opposing sides against each other. Generally preferred by laggards who only know and trust the adversarial process, and will only consider a mutual alternative if everyone is already adopting it. TIP: You may prefer to follow a wellness campaign pursing a mutualizing alternative before trying it yourself.
2. Soft adversarialist: open for opposing sides to find mutual agreement. Generally preferred by those in the late majority who are ready to try this mutualizing alternative after realizing a majority have adequately benefited from it. TIP: You may prefer to follow another's campaign or become a paid supporter of such a campaign to learn more about it.
3. Amicable adversarialist: pit opposing sides only where necessary. Typically preferred by those in the early majority who are ready to try this mutualizing alternative after reading or hearing testimonials from those who glowingly vouch for it. TIP: Follow another's campaign and seriously consider becoming a patron or supporter to gain direct insight how such a campaign can support your particular case beyond the adversarial judicial process.
4. Soft mutualizer: bring opposing sides together when ready to engage needs. Tends to be adopted by early adopters who are ready to try this untried mutualizing alternative if only because it offers some way to solve their problem in a new way that adversarialism repeatedly won't. TIP: If increasingly disillusioned with the many legal roadblocks encountered in the innocence movement, this alternative may be just what you seek.
5. Full mutualizer: ready to fully address needs on all sides of a conflict. Usually only sampled by innovators who are eager to try this mutualizing approach to solve their justice needs even without any assurance this alternative can deliver. TIP: You are just the person we seek to help develop this mutualizing alternative in its earliest stages.
If you are open to alternatives like restorative justice, then consider a wellness campaign to address your need for exoneration. Whether you decide to lead a campaign as a campaigner, or join one as a patron or supporter, or simply follow, you could help improve the social structures currently keeping us all down. We cannot solve our specific problems from the level of generalizing that created them. When the current alienating judicial structure repeatedly fails you, consider engaging this pioneering alternative.
With need-responder guidance in a wellness campaign
Share your particular concerns with this mutual approach. Get their feedback as you explore which option is best for you, for your particular situation, and for your team. [case to project wellness?]
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
On your own without depending on others
While resistance to change is inevitable, it need not be insurmountable. The wellness campaign prepares you to neutralize any feet-dragging by stubborn officials. When offered this mutualizing alternative that's demonstrably more responsive to their own needs, it can be difficult for them to say "no" to your expressed needs.
As a mutualizing approach, respectful skeptics receive their due respect. Their may be some resistance that serves as a necessary critique, nudging us in a better direction. We can thank them whenever graciously illuminating our blind spots. We model the humility we rightly expect from them.
We keep any critique of them within the professional positive-negative-positive ("praise sandwich") format. We sandwich our penalizing "competitive efforts" between our incentivizing "complementing efforts" and our eager commitment to respect their unchosen needs on par with them respecting ours. EXAMPLE:
POSITIVE - "We look forward to complimenting your efforts to reverse this strong claim of innocence.
NEGATIVE - "If you find you cannot within the adversarial system, we will have to compete with your efforts. We shall assert the greater principles of mutuality to identify and clear this strong claim on innocence, by more effectively addressing all the stated concerns.
POSITIVE - "We continue the high aim of serving the interests of justice and assuring the public its safety. And giving you all due credit for helping to resolve the affected unchosen needs on all sides."
Where necessary to resolve needs overlooked by current options, we eventually will apply "tough love". We will apply need-response enforcement to hold all legitimate authority accountable to effectively address the needs they exist to serve. Who watches the watchers? We shall.
With need-responder guidance in a wellness campaign
A basic purpose for a wellness campaign is to level the playing field between powerful judicial official and the relatively powerless. Power relations in the adversarial judicial process undermines actual justice when privileging those in authority to unfairly ignore the affected needs of the vulnerable. Under color of law favoring confirmation bias or insisting procedural fairness was provided despite resulting from tunnel vision, judicial power
Your professional need-responder equips you with the tools to speak truth to power in ways that incentives them to listen to those impacted. There are at least seven ways need-responders equalize power relations using our mutualizing alternative.
1. First, we identify the power relations impacting your wellbeing.
2. We then unpack common phases in that power relation.
3. We replace the adversarial with a reconciling approach.
4. We replace arbitrary legitimacy with earned trust.
5. We support leaders to transform restrictive social structures.
6. We assert the greater power and authority of love.
7. We refer to available research on power dynamics.
The adversarial system tends to incentivize the "power-privileged" police and prosecutor to remain ignorant of their damaging mistakes. They ultimately are not served well by this incentivized lack of awareness.
A need-responsive wellness campaign uniquely addresses the power imbalance inherent in the adversarial judicial system. You and your team incentivize judicial powerholders to focus more on the needs that laws exist to serve. You melt their resistance by listening and honoring their unchosen needs.
You also unpack the limits of their impersonal thinking that easily dehumanizes you. Plenty of resistance comes from those convinced that innocence claimants are rational thinkers prioritizing their self-interest by manipulating their way out of a bind. We upend this fallacy on may levels.
We appreciate rational choice theory is but one of many tools in our toolbox, not some panacea to explain away the accused. It avoids addressing the role of pain from unresolved needs, which prods us to seek relief with less concern how such actions impact the needs of others.
Rational choice theory can help us better understand our moral choices. But it cannot account for all that goes into our decision-making. Not only the poor decisions of arrested offenders but also the biased decisions of judicial powerholders who repeatedly damage innocent lives. They too seek relief with less concern how their actions impact the needs of others. How much of this points to judicial powerholders projecting their own poor moral choices?
When judicial powerholders apply rational choice theory ideologically, it easily slips into what anankelogy identifies as “rational thinker delusion”. That's when one ignores all the evidence that shows we are not the rational beings we like to think we are. Are judicial powerholders rationally choosing to ignore the specific justice needs of the underserved complainant and the wrongly convicted innocent?
A wellness campaign can effectively counter resistance by effectively applying its mutuality approach. The more you engage the complainant's needs and the needs of the judicial officials, the less their resistance can stand. The more we serve the need-responsive substance of justice, the less resistance we expect from the failing forms of justice. The more we address needs with love, the less room for any remaining hate.
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
On your own without depending on others
A wellness campaign sets you apart from the adversarialists who repeatedly stumble into the problem of their unaddressed needs. As you become a responsive mutualizer, you can establish more than your innocence, but also your compelling moral leadership. Others can look up to you as the one who endure the tragedy and came out on top. Because others will be drawn to how you skillfully handle conflicts.
Follow these four steps to neutralize a conflict.
1. Identify the unchosen needs on all sides to a conflict. Your unchosen needs persist as objective facts. So does theirs.
2. Distinguish these unchosen needs from chosen responses to them. What we do to relieve those needs can be adjusted.
3. Report how each other's chosen responses impact each other's unchosen needs. Do we needlessly provoke more needs?
4. Adjust changeable responses to optimally address unchosen needs on all sides. We solve more problems by resolving more needs.
You started to engage the unchosen needs of the complainant back on page five. You learn to separate out any response to such needs. You realize you can challenge a response to a need, but that it's utterly pointless to oppose the unchosen needs themselves. Opposing what others need does not extinguish moral conflict, but enflames it. You gain a vital skill totally lacking in the adversarial judicial process.
You will build this skill during your wellness campaign as you practice engaging the unchosen needs of your supporters. You later engage the unchosen needs of powerholders like your innocence litigator. You eventually will engage the unchosen needs of the DA and prosecutor. By the end of this process, it's these judicial powerholders that may seek our exoneration of them.
With need-responder guidance in a wellness campaign
We can tailor each tool to best apply to your particular innocence case. We recognize there are many different types of wrongful conviction of the innocent.
A. No crime actually occurred (e.g., shaken baby syndrome)
B. Accuser or eyewitness is the actual perpetrator (e.g., gave you the gun they used)
C. Claimant misidentified you (e.g., police lineup mix-up)
D. Accidental injury (e.g., housefire not arson)
E. other.
Each different kind presents different unchosen needs
political - post-partisan politics - resolving politicized needs instead o
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
On your own without depending on others
You can use this messaging feature to invite peer supporters to your wellness campaign during its TEAM phase.
Then build upon their encouraging responsiveness to invite indirect powerholders, like innocence litigators, during the GROW phase. Their responsiveness can build momentum to invite direct powerholders, like the judge and prosecutor, during the final GOAL phase.
We provide other tools for you to attract support to your innocence claim. For example, you could invite each to assess their level of awareness of the problems in the adversarial judicial system. Many are all too aware. Ask those less familiar with the criminal justice system to take the 20-item justifism quiz. Give them insight into why you need this exoneration wellness campaign.
With need-responder guidance in a wellness campaign
Much of this could change. Your particular case can significantly alter some of this. While we work together to establish and publicize your overlooked innocence, let's work together to co-create this pioneering alternative to failed adversarial justice. Let's turn this challenge of your wrongful conviction into an opportunity to spread more hope and love.
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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