Module 7
Influences Leading to Conviction
The video that accompanies this lesson offers more insight and commentary that will help you prepare an effective narrative as part of your comprehensive mitigation strategy.
Module Resources
Learning Objectives
Identify Patterns
Identify patterns, pressures, and missed safeguards
Moral Insight
Convert material into focused section showing accountability
Vivid Scene
Craft a vivid, truthful scene illustrating the turning point
Missed Safeguards
Name safeguards you should have implemented
Lesson Summary
This lesson demonstrates how to write the Influences Leading to the Crime section by turning your knowledge base into a concise narrative of causes and choices. The instructor models the process: return to the AI thread that already contains your transcript and prompt, ask for the next section, paste the draft into your working document, and then edit for voice and accuracy. AI is a tool that can get you most of the way there. Your job is to personalize, correct, and strengthen.
Purpose of This Section
Unlike the Background (which humanizes the person), this section explains how specific attitudes and decisions evolved into criminal conduct. The emphasis is on agency: entitlement, impatience, denial, and attraction to shortcuts—habits formed long before the first illegal act.
The lesson shows a persuasive framing: misconduct didn't start at arrest; it began when the writer decided rules didn't apply and surrounded himself with peers and choices that reinforced that belief.
Use Concrete Detail and a Vivid Scene
In the video, you'll see how the instructor revised the AI text to include a specific moment: recruiting two friends to make a Miami–Seattle run, promising easy money, arranging a car loaded with cocaine, and rationalizing culpability because he didn't want to "touch" the drugs.
Sensory detail (where, who, what was said, how it felt) turns abstractions into evidence of mindset. A single, truthful scene helps a judge see the descent into crime and the harm to others.
Name the Rationalizations—and Reject Them
The draft explicitly calls out lies used to justify decisions: that not handling drugs reduced culpability, that a "victimless crime" exists, that profits made it okay. The section then replaces those myths with clear acceptance: organizing the conduct, corrupting others, and ignoring obvious safeguards made the offense more serious, not less.
List Missed Safeguards
The lesson models a short list of guardrails that were failed to be installed—seeking a mentor, committing to education or a trade, building accountability, practicing patience. Don't make a list of excuses. Rather, offer an insight list that demonstrates mature self-assessment and feeds into the next module, Lessons Learned, where each safeguard becomes an action plan.
Workflow Reminders
Keep the length to ~400–600 words. Maintain first-person voice, avoid legal argument, and ensure a smooth transition: end by signaling that the next section will cover what changed in your thinking and what you're doing now to make things right. Read aloud to remove "AI-ish" phrasing and verify names, dates, and facts.
When finished, you will have a crisp, accountable account of influences and choices that sets up the more forward-looking Lessons Learned section.
Key Takeaways
- Focus on agency, not excuses; show how attitudes became actions.
- Include one vivid, truthful scene that illustrates your turning point.
- Call out past rationalizations and explicitly reject them.
- Name missed safeguards to set up concrete reforms in Lessons Learned.
- Keep it 400–600 words, first-person, judge-ready, and transition into next section.
Self-Directed Exercise
List Influences
Write a Vivid Scene
Draft Section
Revise
Assessment Questions
The core purpose of the Influences section is to:
- a) Re-argue legal innocence
- b) Explain external forces beyond your control
- c) Show how your attitudes and choices led to the offense, without excuses
- d) List every statute involved