exonerative

I especially enjoyed the reference to a new tense, the "past exonerative."

"This usage should be referred to as the past exonerative ."

Bureaucrats use the past exonerative all the time: "The program was implemented" is their way of not quite saying "I did it."

When deniability is impossible, dissociation is the way, and the past exonerative allows the actor to separate himself from the act.

The court found that the forensic evidence was exonerative of Moen, and that in any case reasonable doubt should have acquitted him in the first place.

Vogel communicated with the Israeli prosecutors, providing them with exonerative material on Globke and trying to influence them to keep the trial focussed on Eichmann.

Here, an articulate, nihilistic teenager fails to commit suicide by burning himself to death; after the boy's nightmarish year in a burn unit, his father is moved to perform a daring, and ultimately exonerative, mercy killing.

The "past exonerative" tense is a witticism coined by William Schneider of the New York Times to describe the rhetorical tactic of speaking in the passive voice in order to distance oneself from blame.

Political consultant William Schneider suggested that this usage be referred to as the "past exonerative" tense, and commentator William Safire has defined the phrase as "[a] passive-evasive way of acknowledging error while distancing the speaker from responsibility for it".

"Those of us who have advocated for law enforcement's use of DNA should have made a better connection to DNA's exonerative power long ago," said Christopher H. Asplen, executive director of the federal government's National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence.