Character reference letter template for court

The outline

This is the order federal defender offices and defense lawyers recommend, with each bracket showing what goes in that place.

1. [The date]
2. The Honorable [the judge’s full name]
3. Re: [the full name of the person you are writing for]
4. Dear Judge [the judge’s last name],
5. [Who you are: your name, what you do and where you live.]
6. [How you know them, for how long, and how often you see them now.]
7. [What you know about why they are in court, in one or two sentences.]
8. [One moment you saw yourself that shows what they are like: when it was and what they did.]
9. [The support they have now: home, work, family, treatment, and what you will do to help.]
10. [What you would like the judge to keep in mind, without naming a sentence.]
11. Sincerely,
12. [Your signature, by hand]
13. [Your printed name, phone number or address]

Why a template’s words don’t work

A template gives you the right order, but its sentences belong to someone else, and judges notice. A former federal judge, Mark Bennett, has written that more than half of the letters he received were close to worthless, and that in one case many of 107 letters shared nearly the same phrases.

Defense lawyers give the same warning in plain terms: don’t follow a template, because judges see through it. Phrases like “a pillar of the community” or “a kind and generous person” could be written about anyone, so they tell the judge nothing about this person.

Judges in several countries have also said they give little weight to letters a computer wrote. A letter in your own plain words, about things you saw, is the kind a judge can rely on.

How to fill in each part with your own words

Answer each bracket as if the judge had asked you the question in person, and write the way you would say it.

• Write facts only you could know, such as how you met or what you do together each week.
• Choose one moment and tell it with the details: the year, the place and what the person did.
• Name the charge plainly in a sentence, without arguing about it or making it sound smaller.
• Offer only the help you will really give.
• Keep to one page, and leave out anything you have only heard from others.

Reading the sample

The sample letter on this page follows the outline. Angela writes for her younger brother Daniel before his sentencing, and each paragraph answers one bracket in her own words, including the time Daniel drove their father to dialysis for two years.

Read it for the order and the kind of detail, not the wording. Your letter will be about a different person and different moments.

If you’d like help, our questions ask for each part of the outline one at a time and lay out your answers as a one-page letter, without adding words of our own.

A sample letter

Questions