"Forensic Files" Within a Hair (2002)

Synopsis (CONTAINS SPOILERS): The place is a town called South Bend in the state of Indiana; the year is, I think, 1996. After a series of rapes and burglaries, the police arrests a black man that was bicycling on the street. He is wrongfully convicted (by a jury of all whites, in a second trial, to a 70 year sentence) of some of those crimes after he is positively identified as the perpetrator by some of the victims and one victim's boyfriend, even though the pubic hair found at the scene of one crime couldn't be analyzed and the semen found at the scene of another didn't match his own. He serves in the worst convict status there is, that is, sex offender, risking being raped or murdered in prison. Five years later, a man is surprised by the police while robbing a house, then flees leaving a footprint and his car, replete with evidence. By then a new technique exists for analyzing pubic hair without root; the hair matches this man's (he is sentenced to 30 years); the semen doesn't; the semen matches that of a man already serving sentence. The innocent guy is released. (END OF SPOILERS)

Appraisal: I didn't plan to watch this; I happened to turn the TV on at the exact minute it was about to be aired, and it was tuned on the channel that airs it. I was positively impressed, and as a matter of fact have no negative criticism to make about it. I found it amazing how much I learned from it about (a) the American justice system; (b) the conditions of American prisons; (c) the state-of-the-art in forensic detection. Two final notes: (1) here in Brazil, it is aired under the title "Medical Detectives" (just like that, in English -- go figure...); (2) this news article on the internet dating from 2002 states that the guy who was wrongfully convicted "has filed a federal lawsuit against the city, its police department and 14 of its officers".