Starz has announced that its new original series Wrong Man will premiere Sunday, June 3rd at 9 p.m. ET/PT. This groundbreaking six-episode documentary series from Academy Award nominee and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Paradise Lost) examines three different inmates who have been incarcerated for decades and claim they are innocent. The series will uncover new theories, offer alternate suspects, and reveal startling new evidence that could prove these inmates are not guilty.
In Wrong Man, Berlinger’s cameras follow a team of esteemed legal, investigative and forensic experts including renowned civil rights attorney Ronald Ruby, former prosecutor Sue-Ann Robinson, retired NCIS investigator Joe Kennedy, and Ira Todd, a member of Detroit’s elite Homicide Task Force, as they re-investigate the cases of three inmates who have been locked up for decades and claim they are innocent.
According to the non-profit legal organization Innocence Project, these types of wrongful conviction cases are not rare. They estimate that up to 5% of all prisoners in the U.S. are convicted of crimes they did not commit. With more than 2 million people in prison, that adds up to 120,000 potentially innocent people possibly behind bars. Berlinger said that “partnering with Starz to create a series that represents both great storytelling and an opportunity that actually moves the needle on social justice for the wrongfully convicted has been a great privilege.”
Wrong Man follows investigators into prisons and to the scenes of the crimes to crack open the cases as they hunt for new evidence, track down witnesses, and track to often-reluctant law-enforcement, looking beyond guilt and innocence to expose the flaws in the criminal justice system. The series will take an in-depth look at the following cases:
Evaristo Salas was 16 years old in 1997 when he was sentenced as an adult to 33 years in Washington state prison. His murder conviction was based on two witnesses, including a confidential police informant who came forward to our investigators and spoke on camera publically about his incriminating testimony for the very first time.
Christopher Tapp confessed to killing and sexually assaulting an 18-year-old girl in Idaho but only after multiple and lengthy taped police interrogations. The mother of the victim has become convinced that his confession was coerced by police and that the wrong man is in prison for the murder of her daughter.
Finally, Curtis Flowers is on Mississippi death row despite the fact that for two decades, he’s been tried six times for the same crime by the very same prosecutor in a case riddled with evidentiary problems. Flowers maintains he had no part in the quadruple murder that landed him on death row.
Wrong Man is produced by Third Eye Motion Picture Company, Electus, and RadicalMedia. Erica Sashin (Border Wars) serves as showrunner and executive producer. Berlinger directs two episodes and also executive producers with Chris Grant (Running Wild with Bear Grylls) and Drew Buckley (Darkness) for Electus, along with Ben Silverman (Marco Polo). Jon Doran (Park Bench with Steve Buscemi), Justin Wilkes (What Happened, Miss Simone?), and Jon Kamen (Hamilton’s America) serve as executive producers for RadicalMedia.
