Miscarriages of Justice where an innocent person is falsely convicted of a crime in Live-Action Films.
- An Innocent Man (1989) starring Tom Selleck. Selleck's character is framed by Dirty Cops and jailed.
- In ...And Justice for All Jeff was arrested due to mistaken identity (he had the same name as a suspect), then framed by other inmates for a prison guard's stabbing. Kirkland can't get him out due to the evidence clearing him coming in too late. This leads Jeff to snap, taking hostages after being gang-raped by fellow prisoners and is then shot dead by a police sniper.
- The Archer: All of the camp girls have been sent there regardless of their crimes due to the owner Bob bribing a judge into doing so.
- Atonement, through Briony's mistake in believing Robbie raped someone as a result of what she'd seen briefly while it was dark.
- A unique example in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. A newspaper publisher decides to test the system by having himself framed for the murder of a woman. He intends to wait for the trial to nearly find him guilty before having a friend bring up the evidence to exonerate him. However, the friend is killed on his way to the courthouse and the evidence lost so the man is found guilty. His girlfriend is able to prove his innocence, only for his wife to discover that he did indeed murder the woman, who was his first wife, and his execution is set to go on.
- The 2009 remake of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt plays it mostly the same, as reporter C.J. frames himself to prove a D.A. is corrupt and willing to put innocent people behind bars to pad his record. Again, the evidence is lost and C.J. is put in jail, but his girlfriend Crystal proves his innocence and the case is a mistrial. But then Crystal realizes the murder victim was going to give away she was the "drug addict" from C.J.'s award-winning documentary, proving his career was a fraud. Crystal tells C.J. it was a good plan, as he couldn't be tried again... except it was a mistrial, not an acquittal, which means the police can arrest him all over again.
- This is the cause of the events of The Chase (1994). After a bank robber who wears a clown outfit robs evades capture a random guy gets accused of the crime and railroaded through the courts on no evidence other than that he owns a clown outfit. Physical evidence that would have exonerated him is improperly ruled inadmissible. No wonder he breaks out and makes a run for Mexico.
- In Chicago, the one innocent inmate is the one who gets executed thanks to a Language Barrier. She can only speak Hungarian and no one bothers to get a translator.
- Dial M for Murder, Margot is tried and found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. But the police are really after her husband, and let her go in the end.
- In Double Jeopardy, Ashley Judd's character is wrongly convicted of murdering her husband and spends several years in prison.
- The Fugitive has Dr. Richard Kimble wrongly convicted of his wife's murder, after which he escapes to track down the real murderer, a one-armed man. This was later parodied in Leslie Nielsen's Wrongfully Accused.
- John Coffey in The Green Mile, who's wrongly convicted of raping and murdering two white girls. The main "evidence" was simply him being found holding their corpses crying. Because he was a very large black man however in the Deep South that was enough. It eventually turned out a fellow death row prisoner was the real culprit, but they couldn't prove this and Coffey didn't want to be saved, he's so distraught over the evils people do he'd rather die.
- In The Hunt (2012), before going to authorities about the molestation accusations against the protagonist Lucas, the schoolteacher seeks the opinion of someone without a proper understanding of how to interrogate a child. Consequently, he leads little Klara's answers and produces false proof that is nonetheless taken for the truth. Had Klara been questioned by a qualified expert first, the wrongful Pædo Hunt might have been avoided. Luckily, holes in the accusations ultimately spare Lucas from the charges, but the damage is already done.
- In the Name of the Father is based on the real story of the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven, who were accused of a pub bombing in London in the 1970s. The movie took some liberties with the story for dramatic purposes, but the facts are still the same: they were threatened and lied to in police custody to scare them into confessing, the trial was held in the same city as the bombing and ensured that the jury would be very willing to convict the Four (all were hippies and drug users), and the police specifically prevented two of the Four's alibi from being shown to ensure a conviction. They were all released about 15 years later, but none of the police officers were found guilty of any crimes and one of the Maguire Seven died in prison.
- In Inception, Dom Cobb is on the run for apparently having murdered his wife Mal. It turns out that Mal was insane and convinced that after having spent fifty years in a dreamworld, she was still dreaming and needed to wake up — and the only way to "wake up" is to kill yourself. She tried to make Dom kill himself along with her by deliberately having herself declared sane by multiple psychiatrists, filing a letter stating she was afraid for her life with her attorney, and setting up a hotel room to look like a violent struggle had taken place in it before luring Dom into the room and killing herself. Dom didn't follow through with it, and the setup was convincing enough that he was forced to flee the country.
- Just Cause: Bobby Earl Ferguson was accused of rape, and only got out after he had been driven mad from the torture, scandal, and castration his fellow inmates inflicted upon him. He decided to rape and murder a random girl in a crazy plot to get himself arrested and later exonerated so when he got out and immediately murdered the prosecutor who pushed the first case, everyone involved would thus be guilty of letting a real criminal go free to commit more murders. He manages to utterly succeed in the first and second parts.
- Just Mercy documents the real-life case of death row inmate Walter McMillian, who was charged with the murder of a young white woman in The Deep South. The evidence against McMillian is scant at best, with numerous witnesses stating he was at home at the time (and that the truck he drove going to and from the murder was stripped down for the repairs at the time), but the struggle comes from the fact that the corrupt police want to keep McMillian where he is as a scapegoat for their own failure to find the real killer (not helping McMillian's case was that he was caught in an affair with a white woman prior to the murder, which put him on the police's radar).
- In The Last Seduction: Bridget Gregory frames her lover for murdering her abusive husband, as well as raping her as part of a rape fantasy role-play. She destroys the last piece of evidence that could possibly get him acquitted, and his lawyer tells him that nothing seems to be in his favor.
- The Life of Émile Zola actually isn't strictly about the life of Émile Zola, but rather about one of the most notorious Real Life examples of this trope — the Dreyfus Affair — and Emile Zola's campaign on behalf of the unjustly imprisoned Alfred Dreyfus.
- Long Shot (2017), Juan Catalan was nearly convicted of the murder of Martha Puebla due to him fitting the description of the killer and it took footage of a baseball game from Curb Your Enthusiasm to prove his innocence.
- The climax of A Man for All Seasons turns upon one of these; Richard Rich commits outright perjury against his former acquaintance, Sir Thomas More, in exchange for an appointment as Attorney General for Wales. In the film version, when More figures out what has happened and why, we get this perfect example of Gallows Humour:More: Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... But for Wales?
- No God, No Master: The film closes on the wrongful convictions of Sacco and Vanzetti resulting from the anti-anarchist hysteria.
- No Escape (1994): The Father's followers believe he's wrongly convicted, and only was blamed for his wife's death over prejudice due to him being much older than her. He privately admits to Robbins though that in fact he'd murdered her and passed it off (unsuccessfully) as suicide, expressing remorse.
- In the loosely-based film adaption of the book with the same name, The Running Man, this happens: it kicks the plot off when the police officer protagonist Ben Richards gets wrongly accused of having committed a massacre among innocent civilians, and as punishment for the crime, is selected as a combatant for the titular Blood Sport TV show. However, Richards tried to prevent the massacre and part of the plot is finding the evidence of this to give the real story to the public as well as bringing the corrupt officials behind it to justice.
- The Shawshank Redemption: The driving force of the plot is that Andy Dufresne is wrongly convicted of the murder of his wife and her lover in the misleading circumstantial evidence variant. It then becomes much worse when exculpatory evidence emerges and is destroyed by corrupt officials because Andy has been acting as the warden's accountant during his prison time and now knows too much about his shady finances to be allowed to go free. They murder a witness willing to testify that someone else committed the crime. He eventually escapes to Mexico rather than be legally exonerated.
- Sin City: Marv from "The Hard Goodbye" 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 villains in question. John Hartigan from "That Yellow Bastard" is wrongly imprisoned for eight years on false charges of raping Nancy Callahan, the 11-year-old girl who he saved from pedophile rapist and Serial Killer Junior Roark, whose father is a powerful and corrupt U.S. Senator. Both cases were due to extreme corruption, forged evidence, and confessions acquired by threats — Marv confessed after his mother's life was threatened, and Hartigan when he thought that Nancy's life was in danger, and he was able to get out on parole if he did. (Even if he'd had ironclad proof of his innocence, he could still have readily been charged with excessive force for shooting Junior in the genitals after disarming him.)
- One of the most notorious Real Life examples in British history is dramatized in the film 10 Rillington Place. An unfortunate man named Timothy Evans was hanged in 1950 for the murders of his wife and baby daughter. Three years after his execution, his landlord John Christie was discovered to be a Serial Killer responsible for the deaths of the wife, the daughter, and at least six other people. He was also the star witness against Evans, whose testimony greatly helped in getting the conviction. The scandal helped prompt the UK to abolish capital punishment.
- True Believer: Shu Kai Kim was convicted of a murder he didn't commit due to false evidence presented by the police and prosecutor.
- True Crime: Frank Beechum was found guilty of murdering Amy Wilson, but he's innocent. All the evidence was mistaken and or/misinterpreted.
- The Weight Of Water portrays Louis Wagner
as innocent but found guilty of two murders because the real murderer testified he did it. She recants before he's hanged but the District Attorney refuses to reveal this and lets him die. - Subverted and Played for Laughs in The Wrong Guy. The main character stumbles upon the recently murdered body of his boss/father-in-law and, owing to an incredibly convoluted series of events coupled with his own stupidity, ends up apparently incriminating himself. Terrified that he's about to be subject to this trope, he goes on the run... except that the police already know who the real murderer is, have ample amounts of evidence against him, and subsequently aren't interested in the main character in the slightest.
