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This trope covers when an innocent person goes through the justice system, but for whatever reason is found guilty. The reasons can include corruption in the system, misleading circumstantial evidence, or insurmountable. In
Real Life, it can include bad eyewitness evidence; in fiction, it's more likely to be a false witness, a lying eyewitness.
This can be the premise of a story, or it can be a
Downer Ending.
The inverse — an
Obviously Evil and guilty person going free — is also often seen as a miscarriage of justice; but that is covered by other tropes such as
Karma Houdini.
Examples:
Film
- Marv from Sin City is put on death row and ultimately executed for murdering all the women Kevin and Cardinal Roark killed and ate. Though, to be fair, the list of victims also included all the people that Marv did kill, including the two Complete Monsters in question.
- John Hartigan from "That Yellow Bastard" is wrongly imprisoned for eight years on false charges of raping Nancy Callahan, the eleven-year-old girl who he saved from pedophile rapist and Serial Killer Junior Roark, whose father is a powerful and corrupt U.S. Senator.
- The Fugitive
- In Double Jeopardy, Ashley Judd's character is wrongly convicted of murdering her husband and spends several years in prison.
- The Shawshank Redemption: Andy Dufresne is wrongly convicted of the murder of his wife and her lover. That drives the whole plot.
Literature
- Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban - Sirius Black, in Azkaban.
- Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets - Hagrid, in Azkaban.
- The Count Of Monte Cristo - Edmond Dantes is framed for treason and sent to the Chateau d'If by his former best friend, who wanted the woman he loved, Mercedes, for himself.
- In Kim Newman's "Tomorrow Town", a murder has been committed in a 1970s futurist community. When the investigating detectives get there, they learn that the townspeople have already imprisoned a suspect, who they insist must be the killer, citing that he never really fitted in to the community and that the murder weapon was found in his house. Later that night, one of the townspeople promoting this theory himself tries to kill the detectives, but accidentally manages to kill himself instead. One of the detectives then notes rather dryly that if one of the most enthusiastic proponents of "the first guy did it!" theory later tries to kill the investigating detectives, it's a fairly safe bet that there's an injustice going on.
Live Action TV
- The Rockford Files. In the backstory of the series, Jim Rockford was wrongly convicted of armed robbery and spent five years in prison before receiving a pardon.
- Life
- So many telenovelas it isn't funny nor interesting anymore. This particular troper remembers specially La Madrastra, La Dama de Rosa, and their remakes as specially egregious examples of this trope.
- Crops up occasionally on Law And Order. Usually partially subverted in that the wrongly convicted is either wholly unsympathetic (a white supremacist convicted of child murders that were actually committed by a mentally-ill black man) or turned out be connected after all (a man convicted of killing his wife turned out to have hired the actual killer. He was convicted of murdering the actual killer).
Western Animation
- In the Duck Tales episode "Duckman of Aquatraz," Scrooge McDuck is framed for theft by his rival Flintheart Glomgold and put into prison, where, conveniently, it turns out that his cellmate was also framed by Glomgold.
Real Life
- For film documentary accounts:
- The Thin Blue Line where director Errol Morris made such a convincing case of Randal Adams being framed for murder by the police and the District Attorney that he was exonerated and released.
- Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, where three non-conformist boys
were indicted for a horrific triple murder and convicted even though it's obvious that at best, there is not enough evidence, or at worst, they are innocent boys screwed by community prejudice and hysteria. Here, activists are still working on getting them exonerated with the help of the producers following up with Paradise Lost 2 and soon, Paradise Lost 3, which drop the ambiguity of the first film and firmly support the boys' innocence.
- How this trope doesn't have a massive Troper Tales section is beyond me.
- Ditto, but I assume it's probably because all of them are in for life for just having teeth.
