The Innocence Files review: Netflix’s devastating documentary exposes how wrongful convictions can tear apart lives

Netflix has a true crime treatment for just about every transgression you can imagine, whether it’s murder, kidnapping, or even tiger abuse. The Innocence Files is the latest addition to the genre, but this time there’s a twist: the “perpetrators” did not commit the crimes they are accused of.

The show – overseen by a starry line-up of directors including Oscar-winner Alex Gibney – follows The Innocence Project, a non-profit legal organisation that exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing. Dubbed “the court of last resort”, it was founded by two former public defenders who saw so many problems with the criminal justice system that they felt compelled to act. Looking back on the cases, you'd struggle to fathom how a jury could sentence a person to death on so little evidence.

We meet inmates from all walks of life: a barman, a sailor, a teenage student. But they all seem to have one thing in common: they lack the resources to fight for their freedom. The first case presented is the horrific rape and murder of a three-year-old girl in Mississippi, which sees an innocent man sentenced to life because of bogus bite mark evidence and fairly opaque witness statements.

As each case unfolds, the grim events are recapped in meticulous detail, with crackling archive footage evoking a Nineties America divided by race and in the throes of a crack epidemic. We are introduced to the people who played a part in sending the innocent behind bars. Dr Michael West, for example, is a forensic dentist so committed to his research that he asks to be bitten all over his body so he can examine the marks left by human teeth on the skin. To his dismay, his work is questioned in this series, and he grumbles: “If you don’t like the way I do it, get up off your dead ass, go to the morgue every weekend, spend it with 15 or 20 dead babies, and try coming out of there without being a fruitcake.”

There are moving scenes too, with footage of each innocent man finally being told they are free to go. Many of them have endured years on death row and suffered unthinkable abuse in prison. Their mothers, if they are still alive, cry out in the docks, even louder and harder than when their children were first found guilty.

Race often plays a role. In one case, a white man says he was chosen as a juror because the prosecutor deemed him more likely to convict a black man; in another, there are allegations of neo-Nazism in the local police force. The friend of one freed man puts it simply: “White folks make the damn rules.”​

The Innocence Files is potent in that it shows how wrongful convictions not only destroy individual lives, but also have an impact on science, on what is taken seriously as a legitimate piece of evidence. In almost half of The Innocence Project’s cases, forensic science was misapplied or misused.

The cameras stay with the men after they are released, and it is inspiring the way the barman, the sailor, the teenage student and many others try to move on with their lives after prison, and not hold grudges against a justice system that failed them miserably. In lockdown, we can learn a lot from their patience and humility.

The Innocence Files arrives on Netflix on 15 April