---
title: "ADR 0009: Evidence is not a verdict"
description: "Require explicit evaluators, preserve disagreement, and keep process completion separate from objective completion."
navLabel: "ADR 0009"
order: 109
nav: false
eyebrow: "Decision"
status: "accepted"
theme: "main"
visibility: "public"
---

## Context

An executor can produce artifacts, logs, screenshots, messages, tests, or other evidence. None of those records alone establishes that the user's underlying objective was achieved.

## Decision

Evidence records retain request, kind, subject, producer, observation time, artifact reference, digest, and bounded claims.

Only an explicit trusted evaluator may create an objective verdict. A verdict names the objective, evaluator, evaluator authority, evidence references, status, rationale, time, and optional superseded verdict.

Sufficient evidence may support a verified verdict, but evidence does not automatically promote itself. Missing evaluation leaves the objective unverified.

Disagreement is preserved. Multiple active incompatible verdicts project as disagreement and remain unverified rather than being flattened into a synthetic truth. Supersession is explicit and attributable.

## Consequences

- `execution: succeeded` may correctly coexist with `objective: unverified`;
- evidence producers do not silently become judges of their own work;
- reviewer and verifier authority can be inspected separately;
- negative and conflicting determinations remain addressable;
- later Presertion integration can preserve provenance and dissent without changing the action contract.