“Our Criminal Justice System is Broken, and the Sooner Folks See that the Sooner We Can Begin to Fix It”: Roger Ross Williams on the Netflix docuseries The Innocence Files

Executive produced and directed by Liz Garbus, Alex Gibney and Roger Ross Williams, with episodes also helmed by Jed Rothstein, Andy Grieve and Sarah Dowland, The Innocence Files is a riveting, nine-part docuseries that dives deep into eight wrongful convictions that The Innocence Project and its affiliated Innocence Network fought tooth and nail to overturn.

The Netflix series gets off to a binge-worthy start with its first three installments — “The Evidence: Indeed and Without Doubt,” “The Evidence: The Truth Will Defend Me,” and “The Evidence: The Duty to Correct” — all directed by Academy Award-winner Roger Ross Williams. (And if your time is limited, or if you’re just on streaming service overload, this is the must-see trio. Though you might also want to add Garbus’s equally strong “The Witness: Making Memory” to your queue. The only episode told through the eyes of a female rape survivor who unintentionally put the wrong man away, it marks the first time I’ve seen portrayed onscreen the awful toll taken when a victim becomes a perpetrator through no fault of her own.)

In three tightly edited episodes Williams tackles the horrifying cases of Levon Brooks, Kennedy Brewer, and Keith Allen Harward — all convicted mostly on the basis of unreliable bite mark evidence and all subsequently cleared through DNA (though only after serving a shocking 16 years, 13 years, and 33 years, respectively). Brooks and Brewer were both accused of the rape and murder of two different three-year-old girls in small-town Mississippi – and both had their teeth analyzed by a forensic odontologist named Dr. Michael West whose license was later revoked. Harward, the only white man of the bunch, was accused of raping a woman and murdering her husband in Newport, Virginia in the early 80s. To the jury the bite mark “evidence” proved stronger than the fact that Harward didn’t even match the hazy description of the assailant.

Filmmaker was fortunate enough to catch up with Williams to discuss his docuseries contributions soon after all nine episodes dropped on Netflix on April 15th.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.