How to Use exculpate in a Sentence

exculpate

verb
  • I will present evidence that will exculpate my client.
  • The court exculpated him after a thorough investigation.
  • There’s so much sound and color here that the self-exculpating scenes fit right in, vivid and convincing.
    — Paul Elie, New York Times, 2 Dec. 2016
  • The fact that the bombardiers are Saudi hardly exculpates the United States.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 5 Oct. 2019
  • The president of the United States has made no comment on the deaths of four soldiers except to exculpate himself.
    — David A. Graham, The Atlantic, 17 Oct. 2017
  • The leaking of the above letter, while apparently an attempt to exculpate him, only makes his awareness more apparent.
    — Stephen Galloway, The Hollywood Reporter, 24 Oct. 2019
  • And, of course, the German military is to be exculpated, as having acted honorably.
    — Adam Nossiter, New York Times, 16 Mar. 2018
  • Lloris was keen to exculpate his manager, emphasizing that Mourinho sent them out to be positive and attack.
    — Joshua Law, Forbes, 19 Mar. 2021
  • And that accountability requires more than self-exculpating statements from the cardinals involved.
    — Tara Isabella Burton, Vox, 29 July 2018
  • No evidence emerged linking the man to the crime at the school in Myanmar’s capital, Naypyitaw, and some testimony exculpated him.
    — Washington Post, 19 Dec. 2019
  • The effort to exculpate and vindicate him relies on misdirection and blame-shifting and is thoroughly unconvincing.
    — Rich Lowry, National Review, 13 Nov. 2022
  • To accede to the idea that whiteness can be lost, albeit in the name of open-endedness and open-mindedness, is to exculpate the capitalist imperialism that invented race in the first place.
    — Namwali Serpell, The Atlantic, 2 Aug. 2022
  • In fact, Hasina even partially exculpated a terrorist who attacked a blogger who had written about the prevalence of superstitions in the country.
    — Sumit Ganguly, Foreign Affairs, 6 July 2016
  • Thus, Harvey’s magnitude does not exculpate the government of liability for its actions.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 19 Dec. 2019
  • American leaders can indulge in such self-exculpating flights of fancy via a stolid ideological refusal to deny the true implications of a state built on racial power.
    — Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, The New Republic, 6 Aug. 2019
  • Service makes clear that any incriminating evidence was surely scrubbed from the Soviet files in Moscow to exculpate Lenin.
    — Terry Hartle, The Christian Science Monitor, 6 Sep. 2017
  • In no part of the statement did the official provide any evidence that would exculpate the Saudi government for Khashoggi’s disappearance.
    — Alex Ward, Vox, 15 Oct. 2018
  • The documentary includes an interview with a whistleblower who claimed bosses told him to doctor evidence to exculpate the agency in the death of Hernández Rojas.
    — Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times, 9 Jan. 2026
  • The new e-mail, which came to light because of Brown’s lawsuit, backs up his claims, showing that the prosecutor at the time, Dan Rizzo, was aware of evidence that could exculpate Brown.
    — Anne Branigin, The Root, 4 Mar. 2018
  • The East defined itself in the tradition of communists who had resisted fascism, giving rise to a state doctrine of remembrance that effectively exculpated it from wartime atrocities.
    — Katrin Bennhold, New York Times, 9 Nov. 2019
  • At root, the only political considerations permitted into the gun debate are those that exculpate the owners, distributors, and manufacturers of the guns.
    — Jacob Bacharach, New Republic, 23 Feb. 2018
  • Prosecutors said examining Suzanne Morphew's body could incriminate or exculpate her husband.
    — Emily Shapiro, ABC News, 6 May 2022
  • The justices heard oral arguments on Tuesday morning in one case that could determine whether a death-row prisoner gets a chance to potentially exculpate himself through DNA testing.
    — Matt Ford, The New Republic, 12 Oct. 2022
  • With an emotional openness that successors like Pallbearer and Spirit Adrift would take and run with, Walker exculpates what’s in his heart and sings it directly into the heart of the listener.
    — Brad Sanders, Pitchfork, 17 Jan. 2026
  • Examining Suzanne Morphew's body could either incriminate or exculpate her husband, prosecutors said.
    — Erielle Reshef, ABC News, 15 May 2023
  • However the public chose to remember her, the German government exculpated Mata Hari in 1930.
    — Ray Cavanaugh, Time, 13 Oct. 2017
  • Yet for the insanity defense to live up to the moral imperative it was designed to embody — exculpating those with diminished responsibility for their acts — better mechanisms for evaluating release will need to be adopted, Slobogin says.
    — Mac McClelland, New York Times, 27 Sep. 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'exculpate.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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