UNJUSTLY ACCUSED
There have been many excellent movies about defendants who were unjustly accused and convicted. In 2012 the peerless Ken Burns weighed in with his take on The Central Park Five. A horrific rape and assault of a female jogger in New York’s Central Park captured the attention of a nation. Five young men in the wrong place at the wrong time are brought in and grilled. Believing they will be allowed to go home if they tell the cops what they want to hear, several confess. Their trials are swift and merciless and they are sentenced to long prison terms. Then, years later, a convicted rapist admits that in fact he was the culprit. This is a fascinating story, made more so by the fact that the prosecutors still maintain their belief in the guilt of these young men in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. 
You don’t have to go far to find a similar case. The Trials Of Darryl Hunt (2006) is about a wrongly accused North Carolina man who spent 19 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. A young reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal was brutally raped and murdered leaving her workplace.  Hunt was convicted on shaky eyewitness testimony placing him near the scene. DNA evidence exonerated Hunt. Another person, linked to the crime by his own DNA, confessed.
The Thin Blue Line (1988) is directed by esteemed documentarian Errol Morris (Gates Of Heaven, Mr. Death, A Brief History Of Time). A policeman is murdered in a drive-by shooting, and a juvenile implicates Randall Dale Adams as the killer. Morris carefully re-enacts the crime from various angles and pretty much proves that Adams is innocent. A year later Adams was exonerated and released.  
Jessica Sanders’ After Innocence (2005) covers not one but seven defendants who were sentenced to prison and later exonerated by DNA evidence. While not as intensive as the films about a single case, Sanders’ method is very convincing and very troubling. This film won several awards and is a real eye-opener. 
Conviction (2010) is not a documentary, but is based on a true story. Hillary Swank plays Betty Ann Waters, a high school dropout who put herself through law school so she could take up the case of her brother Kenny, serving a life sentence for murder.
West Of Memphis (2012) represents the conclusion of a bunch of films about the same incident. HBO shot three films about the West Memphis Three who were jailed on extremely shaky evidence and slipshod police work. Those are all titled Paradise Lost and were released in 1996, 2000 and 2012. They are just fine but perhaps more than most of you will want to know about this incident. West Of Memphis tells the story quite well in about two hours.
All of the movies in this article are available on DVD. All are for mature audiences.