An excellent documentary on police corruption in Boston and the unjust imprisonment by an innocent man

 Remy Berkel's 2020 8-episode series, Trial 4, is a truly excellent documentary about the corruption of the Boston Police Department in the 1990s and how an innocent man, Sean Ellis, a 19-year-old black man w/ no arrest record, was charged with and convicted of the murder of a Boston drug detective, John J. Mulligan, who by all accounts abused the system and had many enemies. Despite the evident cronyism and outright illegality throughout the arrest, trial, and incarceration of Ellis - who spent 20 years in prison before his release and the opportunity to face a 4th trial for the shooting - the corrupt cops and the Suffolk County DA stood together (well documented at the time by the Globe) and persisted in hanging the collar on Ellis, whose crime was to be present at the wrong place at the wrong time (a 3 a.m. murder scene in Roslindale. Given his sentence of life without parole, he was headed toward dying in prison and would have were it not for the smart, selfless, and persistent efforts or his defense attorney, Rosemary Scappichio. Imprisonment of the innocent has become an all-too-familiar story, which has been treated well in other episodic and shows, such as Just Mercy and Rectified, but this series stands out for its scope (the case resonates across the political and journalistic landscape of Boston for 20 years), its focus on the central character, and most of all for the clear storytelling of Berkel and team who unravel the threads slowly and carefully and keep us well-informed throughout the 8 episodes despite the many jumps back and forth in time. To their credit, those who commented on the case for this documentary were by no means all sympathetic to Ellis and his plight. The Berkel team, however, included in each episode a list of the (many) whom they approached who declined to take part in the project. It's definitely a film worth viewing, in particular for those in the Boston area.