"exculpation" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to the action of freeing someone from blame or guilt. For example, "The court's exculpation of the defendant was met with cheers from the courtroom."
But otherwise, by and large, everyone is in the clear.You might expect a government that was up-ended by this affair to greet such exculpation with gasps of relief, if not joyous incredulity.
To those better versed in its ups and downs, indeed, a duty of exculpation can seem especially vexing when some of the best sport of the season gets relegated to a relative footnote.
But is it sick or normal that we want to watch such things in the name of entertainment, as a kind of savoury alternative to Sex and the City 2? I could add more liberal bleatings of exculpation, except for one thing.
If Watergate made it axiomatic that the coverup trumps the crime, the Checkers speech can be regarded as an occasion when a style of exculpation proved more memorable than the substance of an accusation.
Burroughs's craving for exculpation eventually settled on the certainty that an "Ugly Spirit" had deflected his aim.
Having already written an autobiography, Kerik lacks that particular route of exculpation.
Most of those voters now fretting about their prospects, and doubting Mr Brown, will ultimately keep their jobs and their homes, and perhaps even gain from falling prices and interest rates.The perils of powerSelf-exculpation, hyperactivity (contrasted with alleged Tory inertia), homes and hope: that is Labour's political strategy.
The book brims not only with the self-exculpation you might expect but also with a good deal of self-congratulation which, in the circumstances, you might not.
Together, they amount to a neat self-exculpation in the wake of an American departure: violence is already widespread, and it can't get that much worse.
This is not something Hughes himself could ever have written about directly: it would have looked too much like self-exculpation.
There is humility to compensate for the passages of shifty self-exculpation.
