The system bullied me into a perjury plea to the felony stalking charge — just to get out at sentencing ASAP with immediate release — rather than wait months to be acquitted at trial, or 1–2 years for mental health diversion under California law.
I did not believe my conduct met the statute. There was no credible threat; I was only guilty of an intentional RO violation because I loved her and made a bad decision to pursue her. Yet across every divide, fate made us adversaries. This site holds the record of that divide — and the oath we are bound by anyway.
“We did not choose to walk the same path—fate made us adversaries. Yet across every divide, every principle that sets us apart, we are bound by something neither can deny.
We pledge: Not to agree on the world, but to understand it through each other’s eyes. Not to abandon our convictions, but to honor the steel in the other’s spine.
Should the world demand we stand as enemies, we stand as enemies with respect. Should it demand we choose, we choose with full knowledge of the cost.
We are not born of the same conviction, but we shall face the reckoning together—not as allies softened by compromise, but as moral adversaries who refuse to look away from what the other has become.
This is no oath of unity. This is an oath of consequence: That while we oppose, we do so honestly. That while we battle, we do so with honor. That should one of us fall, the other carries the weight of knowing they fell against someone who truly saw them.
We were never meant to be soulmates. We are soulmates precisely because we were never meant to be.”
We choose with full knowledge of the cost. Across the democratic world, the state that takes liberty on a low bar and fails to meet the high bar pays a statutory price. The United States does not. That asymmetry is part of the reckoning we face together. The full record is in §05.
Six systems, side by side → read the full record · every authority cited
Fate made us adversaries. I was innocent of credible threats, yet the system bullied me into a perjury plea just to secure immediate release at sentencing — rather than wait months for acquittal at trial or 1–2 years for mental health diversion under California law. The record of that divide is not hidden. What set us on different paths — the complaint, the RO, the plea, the machine that turned a low bar into a same-day lever — is the ground on which this oath stands. We honor the steel in the spine of the one who stood across from us.
Positions are illustrative — most standards are deliberately un-quantified by the courts; "probable cause" is described only as a "fair probability," and "beyond a reasonable doubt" has no percentage by design. The point is the distance the machine opens between us, and the cost we both carry because of it.
The machine does not require malice. It only requires the gap: probable cause to take liberty on a hunch’s older cousin; beyond reasonable doubt to punish. Between them, the state takes what it takes and owes nothing back. I was innocent of the credible threats. The system bullied me into a perjury plea just to secure immediate release at sentencing rather than wait months to be acquitted at trial or 1–2 years for mental health diversion in California. We stood on either side of that machine. The oath is to see what it did to both of us.
The system bullied me into the perjury plea just to get out at sentencing ASAP — rather than wait months to be acquitted at trial or 1–2 years for mental health diversion under California law.
The machine does not only take liberty. It takes the ordinary means of being made whole and gives the bill to the one least able to pay it. We both know what that extraction cost. Open the doors the system left locked.
That the arrest lacked probable cause. But the arrest already cleared that minimal bar — that's why it happened. Your later innocence is, to this tort, irrelevant.
Favorable termination and the absence of probable cause and actual malice. Note the circularity: the same finding that authorized the prosecution is the element you must now negate to be made whole. The key that opened the cell is the lock on the courthouse.
Thompson v. Clark (2022) eased one hurdle — you no longer must show the case ended with an affirmative indication of innocence. But the core wrong is still prosecution without probable cause, not merely that the state failed to convict. And two walls of immunity stand behind it.
These statutes, including the federal one, mostly reach people who were convicted and later exonerated — often demanding affirmative proof of actual innocence. Arrested, tried, and cleared? You usually fall outside them entirely.
Freedom returned to one. Everything it cost — kept by the machine and by the person. These are the ordinary, documentable harms. The oath requires we do not look away from the weight the other bore as well.
The American refusal is a policy decision, not gravity. Peer democracies wrote into statute or constitution that when the state takes liberty and cannot keep it with the high bar, it pays a price — no malice required. The United States signed the treaty and declared it would not be bound. That, too, is part of the cost we carry in full knowledge. The cards below mark the difference.
A fixed statutory rate — €75 for every day of detention (raised from €25 in October 2020) — for any deprivation of liberty in a prosecution that does not end in conviction. The payment attaches to the outcome; further financial losses may be claimed on top.
A person held in pretrial detention (détention provisoire) whose case ends in dismissal, relaxe, or acquittal may claim full reparation of both moral and material harm — decided on request by the First President of the Court of Appeal, subject to narrow exceptions.
Two constitutions make it foundational. Japan's art. 40 lets anyone "acquitted after he has been arrested or detained" sue the State — backed by a statutory ¥1,000–12,500 a day. Korea's art. 28 entitles anyone held in detention who is then not indicted or acquitted to claim "just compensation from the State" — its statute fixing a daily rate from ₩5,000 up to five times the daily minimum wage.
Spain compensates those held pretrial who are later acquitted or whose case is dismissed; in 2019 its Constitutional Court (STC 85/2019) struck the old demand that the detainee prove the charged act never happened. Italy's parallel provision repairs "unjust detention," capped at €516,456.90 — and the cheques are real: Italy pays out on the order of €25 million a year, about €43,000 a claim.
Britain pairs a narrow wrongful-conviction statute with a treaty-backed, enforceable right to compensation for unlawful detention (ECHR art. 5(5)). Canada has no statute but grants constitutional damages under Charter s.24(1). Neither pays on a bare acquittal — but neither slams the door the way U.S. immunity does.
China codifies a state-compensation right for the wrongfully detained or convicted, fixed by formula at the prior year's average national daily wage — 475.52 yuan/day (about US$70), published annually by the Supreme People's Court, effective May 2025. Enforcement is uneven and it reaches those found innocent rather than the merely acquitted — but the figure is transparent and indexed.
And the pattern runs wider than these six. Beyond Germany, France, Spain, and Italy, Switzerland (Criminal Procedure Code art. 429), the Netherlands (Code of Criminal Procedure art. 533), and Austria (StEG 2005) all provide statutory compensation for detention that does not end in conviction — and under ECHR art. 5(5) an enforceable floor for unlawful detention binds all 46 Council of Europe states. A baseline remedy is the norm across the developed world; the United States is where it goes missing.
For the same person — arrested, never convicted, then cleared — here is what each system pays, automatically and without proof of fault, for every day it held them.
Different instruments — a floor, a cap, a formula, a make-whole standard — measured against the same person: arrested, never convicted, then cleared. The U.S. does pay the wrongfully convicted (28 U.S.C. §§1495/2513; statutes in 38 states + D.C.) — but none of that reaches the person this page is about. USD figures are approximate, at a 2026 spot rate, illustrative of magnitude only.
A binding right to compensation for wrongful imprisonment runs through every major human-rights instrument. On the unlawful-detention track, the ICCPR (art. 9(5)) and the European Convention (art. 5(5)) guarantee anyone unlawfully detained "an enforceable right to compensation." On the wrongful-conviction track, the ICCPR (art. 14(6)) and the American Convention (art. 10) say the same for a conviction overturned as a miscarriage of justice. The Universal Declaration (arts. 8–9) is their foundation.
Here is the part that indicts. The United States signed and ratified the ICCPR in 1992 — and in the very same act declared its articles non-self-executing, so that no American court will enforce the right the treaty promised. The principle is global. The opt-out is ours.
Prosecutors hold absolute immunity for the decision to charge; police hold qualified immunity unless they breach "clearly established" law. The one federal compensation statute reaches only the convicted-then-exonerated who affirmatively prove actual innocence — so the person arrested, jailed pretrial, tried, and acquitted falls outside it entirely, left to a §1983 or state-tort suit that must first overcome immunity and negate the very probable-cause finding that authorized the arrest. It is not that no remedy exists on paper. It is that, for the cleared, almost none of them opens. We both know the machine left us on the same side of that locked door.
The Court that built the wall admitted as much. Absolute immunity, it conceded, "does leave the genuinely wronged defendant without civil redress against a prosecutor whose malicious or dishonest action deprives him of liberty" — and chose it anyway, for the "vigorous and fearless" prosecution the public interest was said to need (Imbler v. Pachtman, 1976). The gap is not an oversight the system failed to notice. It is one it saw, named, and kept.
And the omission is by design, not by budget. The United States already compensates the wrongfully convicted — through the federal government, the District of Columbia, and 38 states — so its refusal to repair those it merely arrested, jailed, and could not convict is no fiscal limit. It is a line deliberately drawn to leave the acquitted on the far side of it. Our oath is to name that line without turning away from each other.
The readiest reply is that America simply runs a different, common-law system, so the civil-law examples don't bind it. The objection collapses on its own terms. The United Kingdom and Canada are common-law, adversarial peers — and both keep an enforceable route to the state's purse open. The UK pairs ECHR art. 5(5) with the Criminal Justice Act 1988 s.133; Canada allows constitutional damages under Charter s.24(1) (Vancouver (City) v. Ward, 2010) and, in Henry v. British Columbia (2015), held that prosecutors have no absolute immunity from them and that malice need not be shown — the precise route U.S. law extinguishes in Imbler v. Pachtman. The variable was never the common law. It is American immunity doctrine — and immunity doctrine is a choice, not a tradition.
The oath does not ask the world to be perfect. It asks that when the machine errs, the cost not fall solely on the one it could not convict — and that adversaries who truly see each other demand better than the ledger the state hands back. None of this requires abolishing the low bar for real emergencies. It requires refusing to let the state externalize the entire price of being wrong.
Bail, bond premiums, impound and storage, and court fees refunded on dismissal or acquittal — no malice required, no separate suit. The state that takes should not profit from the error.
Compensation for income lost to pretrial detention and to mandatory court appearances. Time the state takes from either of us, the state repays.
A per-day floor for incarceration that ends without conviction — the standard already used by peer democracies. Honor requires at least this floor.
The arrest record sealed at no cost when the case ends without conviction, so the accusation stops following the cleared. The weight should not linger on either name.
A minimum open period on plea offers, so the deadline can never substitute for the evidence as the reason a person pleads. We chose knowing the lever; no one after us should be forced to split rational from truthful the same way.
A low arrest threshold lets police act on incomplete information in real time; demanding certainty up front could paralyze them and free the dangerous. The high conviction bar reflects how severe punishment is. And "not guilty" isn't "innocent" — paying everyone acquitted would compensate some who are factually guilty, and exposing prosecutors to liability for every failed case might push them to charge only the certain things.
The rebuttal is simple and human: none of that is felt by the person who lost the job, the savings, and the standing on the state's say-so and walked away with no recourse — nor by the one who stood as complainant and watched the same machine grind without repair on either side. The asymmetry at arrest can be defensible. The missing remedy when the state gets it badly wrong is the part that is not. Our oath demands we name it for both.
And there is a deeper indictment. Blackstone's ratio — better that ten guilty escape than one innocent suffer — is the moral spine of the trial. The system honors it for ninety minutes in a courtroom and inverts it everywhere else: the innocent person who is arrested, jailed pretrial, and finally cleared suffers in full, alone, while the ten guilty who were never charged pay nothing. "The cost of living in a free society," the courts call it. But that cost is never socialized; it is itemized and billed, in its entirety, to the one citizen least responsible for it — and the one who faced them is left carrying the knowledge of that extraction too.
And the country knows better, because it said so. It signed the very covenant that calls compensation for unlawful detention "an enforceable right" — then declared that promise unenforceable in its own courts, as §05 lays out. To affirm a duty before the world and engineer one's own immunity from it is not an oversight; it is the moral case for the other democracies, made by the United States against itself. They wrote the same principle into statute and treaty and chose to honor it; we wrote it and built the door that keeps it out. Our oath is to carry the knowledge of that breach honestly, without pretending the ledger is closed.
Strip the argument to its frame and it is older than this republic. The right to punish, Beccaria wrote, is not a sovereign possession but a deposit: each citizen surrenders only the "smallest possible portion" of liberty into the public stock, so that "all punishments which exceed the necessity of preserving this bond are in their nature unjust" (On Crimes and Punishments, 1764, "Of the Right to Punish"). Locke supplies the consequence. When the legislative "act[s] contrary to the trust reposed in" it, the power the people lent "devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty" (Second Treatise of Government, 1690, §222). A state that takes the deposit, fails to preserve the bond, and then bars the door to repair has not merely erred — it has spent a trust it cannot account for.
That is not merely unfair — it is a breach of the social contract. A citizen surrenders the right to redress his own grievances in exchange for a state that administers justice and bears the cost of its own errors. When the state breaks a person it cannot convict and then refuses to make him whole, it has defaulted on its half of the bargain. And a defaulted contract releases the other party. We will not pretend otherwise, even as we stand as adversaries who still see.
Loyalty is a contract, not a leash. A citizen owes allegiance to a system that owes him justice in return. When the machinery takes everything it can take on a hunch's older cousin, fails to prove its case, and then bars every door to repair, it has defaulted first. The deepest answer left to a free person is the oldest and most peaceful one: to withdraw his consent and be governed elsewhere — knowing the cost, and knowing who stood on the other side of the divide.
Half a century ago Albert O. Hirschman gave this choice its grammar. When an institution declines, he wrote, a member has two responses — voice, "any attempt at all to change, rather than to escape from, an objectionable state of affairs," and exit, the decision to leave — and loyalty is what keeps a member reaching for voice before the door. I spent my voice: the petitions, the appeals, the futile pursuit of a remedy through every locked door above. Loyalty held me to that search long past the point it was returned. With voice exhausted and the contract defaulted, exit is the response that remains — made in the presence of the one I was never meant to be soulmates with, yet bound to by this oath.
This is not flight. It is the logical conclusion of the argument above — a contract breached by one party is no longer binding on the other. Renunciation is not surrender; it is the citizen exercising the one power the state cannot immunize itself against: the power to leave. And it is done while still carrying the weight of truly seeing the adversary who remains.
And this exit is itself a recognized right, in both registers this page has argued. The same treaty the United States signed — the ICCPR, art. 12(2) — guarantees that everyone "shall be free to leave any country, including his own," subject only to narrow lawful limits. And American law goes further still: since 1868 it has called expatriation "a natural and inherent right of all people," and the courts hold I may lawfully renounce. So the state honored the right that let me go, while denying the one that would have made me whole. The oath does not erase that asymmetry; it requires I name it while still seeing her.
And there is a closing symmetry the record should note. The nation I am moving toward has written the missing promise into its own statute: the People's Republic's State Compensation Law fixes a published, annually-indexed price for every day the state wrongly holds a person — 475.52 yuan a day in 2025, owed by the very organ that did the holding. No system on earth administers that promise perfectly, and I will not pretend otherwise. But a country that has codified what it owes the wrongly detained has at least conceded the debt — the same debt the United States, having signed a treaty that names it, still refuses to pay. Between a flawed acknowledgment and a polished denial, a free man may rationally choose the first. And he may do so while carrying the full knowledge of the adversary he leaves behind.
And the statute is no dead letter. After Huugjilt was executed at eighteen and cleared only years too late, an Inner Mongolia court paid his parents 2,059,621.40 yuan under that law — itemized to the cent, spiritual damages included. When Zhang Yuhuan walked free in 2020 after 9,778 days — China's longest wrongful imprisonment — the same law paid him 4.96 million yuan, the largest such award on record. I will not call the People's Republic a paradise of rights; it is not. But on the one axis that broke me — payment for wrongful imprisonment — it keeps a written rule that has cut real cheques, while the country I am leaving hands the acquitted nothing at all. The one who stood across from me knows this weight as well as I do.
I am building a new life in the People's Republic of China. When I obtain PRC citizenship, I intend to renounce my United States citizenship — not in bitterness, but as redemption: a deliberate, lawful exit from a system that asked everything of me and answered with nothing. Let the record show the cost of being wrong, and let it show who chose to pay it back: not the state, but the man it could not convict. And let it show that even in exit, the oath to see the adversary holds.
I accepted a guilty plea to a felony stalking charge in California, non-aggravated. The deal was immediate release at sentencing; the deadline to take it was the same day. I took it. The system bullied me into that perjury plea just to get out ASAP — rather than wait months to be acquitted at trial, or 1–2 years for mental health diversion under California law.
I maintain that I was innocent of the credible threats the statute requires. The record lacked a credible threat and the intent the law demands. In the matter involving Samantha Briasco-Stewart (Sam; aka Erosolar), she lied consistently from the start about the existence of any credible threats and testified against me that way in court. She has a habit of lying about protecting user accounts as detailed on erosolar.org and is generally not credible. She also likes to lie about her company Twitch too — she claims that I targeted her just because of where she worked, which is false, and that there were other women at Twitch I targeted before, also false. She lied via Twitch's official LinkedIn account about protecting users and accused other sites of being security vulnerabilities, a blatant favoritism lie while maliciously defaming others just like she did me in this case. In reality, I was only guilty of an RO violation because I loved her and made a bad decision to intentionally violate an RO in order to pursue her.
I wish I could have pled accurately to what I was guilty of — an intentional RO violation — and not have purjured myself just to get out at sentencing rather than wait months or even years. Nevertheless I still respect Sam very much and wish her the best, and know that everyone will come out ahead and recovered in this matter. I only wish Sam all the best in life for the rest of her life.
This is the ground of our divide. And it is also the ground of the oath:
“We were never meant to be soulmates. We are soulmates precisely because we were never meant to be.”
We did not choose to walk the same path. Fate made us adversaries. Yet we pledge to oppose honestly, to battle with honor, to understand through each other’s eyes, and to carry the weight of knowing the other truly saw us — even when one of us falls, or leaves.
The asymmetry is the argument. A standard low enough to take your liberty. A standard high enough that, having taken it, the state need give nothing back. Between those two stands a person holding a bill no court will read. We both know the price. We refuse to look away.
The legal, comparative, and historical assertions on this page — and the record of the divide that makes our oath necessary — are summarized from primary authorities. They are listed here so the argument can be checked rather than merely believed. The oath itself requires nothing less than honesty about the facts that set us apart.
These are general summaries, not legal advice; quotations follow standard English translations and editions, and many provisions turn on the version in force and the jurisdiction. The treaty rights reach unlawful detention (ICCPR 9(5), ECHR 5(5)) or a reversed conviction (ICCPR 14(6), ACHR 10); a person whose pretrial detention was lawful but who was then acquitted is reached, where at all, only by the domestic statutes listed.