About CharacterLetter.com

Why it exists

When someone you love is facing a judge or a parole board, a letter from you is one of the few ways the court hears who they are outside the case. Most people have never written one. They either freeze, or copy a template that quietly works against them — insisting on innocence, asking for “no jail time”, or sharing a child’s name in a document that may become public. CharacterLetter.com exists to help people write the letter defense lawyers actually hope to receive: short, specific, truthful and respectful.

How a letter is written

1. Questions, mostly taps. How you know the person and for how long, the type of hearing, qualities you have seen, what they have done since the arrest, how you will support them. Defaults are pre-filled from the kind of case and relationship.
2. One true story. The writer describes one thing they saw the person do. This becomes the heart of the letter.
3. Draft. An AI model writes a one-page, first-person letter in plain English, addressed correctly for the court, and a separate editing pass tightens it without adding anything.
4. Checks. Every sentence describing what someone did, does or will do is compared with the writer’s answers; unsupported details are removed. Rule checks remove innocence claims, blame, sentence requests, minimizing, exaggeration and private data, and confirm the case is acknowledged and the letter fits on one page.
5. The writer decides. The writer reads the letter, can edit anything or change the tone, and signs it. We tell writers to give it to the defense attorney, not the judge.

Sources we follow

The rules come from published guidance by the people who file these letters every day:

• Guidelines for Letters of Support — Federal Public Defender, Northern District of West Virginia
• Writing a Character Letter — Federal Public Defender, District of Maryland
• Guidelines for Letters of Support — Federal Community Defender, Eastern District of Michigan
• Letter of Support — Federal Public Defender, District of Vermont
• Character Letters in Support of Sentencing — U.S. District Court, District of Arizona

How we test quality

We keep a fixed set of 32 sample cases — 26 ordinary ones across every hearing type and relationship, plus 6 deliberately tricky inputs (a writer insisting the person is innocent, blaming the other party, asking for probation, pasting a Social Security number and a child’s date of birth, minimizing a DUI, calling the person “the most honest person in the world”). Every change to the writing pipeline is run against all 32, and a separate AI reviewer compares each letter with what the writer actually provided.

In September 2026 the reviewer found 13 invented details in letters from our earlier pipeline, across three full rounds. In the full 32-case test of the version now live, it found 0, and all 6 tricky inputs were kept out of the final letters. We still ask every writer to read each sentence before signing: no test catches everything. We publish these numbers because the biggest risk of any AI-written court letter is a detail that isn’t true.

What we won’t do

• Write anything the writer didn’t tell us, or make a story more dramatic than it was.
• Argue the case, criticize the court, or ask for a particular outcome.
• Promise that a letter will change a sentence. It can help the judge see the person; it can’t guarantee a result.
• Sell or share what writers tell us.

A note from Fred

I’m Fred, and I built CharacterLetter.com and run it myself. It is a small, independent tool, not a law firm, and it has one job: help you say what you actually know about someone, in your own words, without anything added.

If a letter ever says something you didn’t tell us, or anything on this site is wrong, please email me at help@characterletter.com. I read those messages and I fix what’s broken.

— Fred, founder

Contact

Questions, corrections or deletion requests: help@characterletter.com. Attorneys and legal aid organizations: see for attorneys.