Protesting too much: I have in my hands a list ...

'CHARLIE, what's the biggest cop mistake?" asks a character in the first episode of the new ABC television show In Justice.

"Making an early assumption?" replies Charlie.

"Yes, an early assumption--and sticking with it."

And with this insight, the heroes of In Justice--a scrappy team of lawyers and investigators who try to free innocent people from prison--arrive at the breakthrough that allows them to right another wrong. The premise of In Justice is simple: The criminal-justice system is so fundamentally crooked that it requires a weekly corrective from the fresh-faced do-gooders who work at the National Justice Project. The NJP and its caseload may be fictional--a disclaimer at the start of each episode announces that the show "is not intended to reflect any actual event or person"--but they are based on the various "innocence projects" that have sprung up around the country in recent years. Their goal is to help prisoners who claim to be innocent, and many of them focus on death-row inmates.

Some time ago, opponents of the death penalty recognized that if they were ever going to win hearts and minds, they would need to focus less on candlelight vigils than on producing an irrefutable example of an innocent person who had been wrongly sentenced to death. In short, they would need a poster child.

What they got was a cover boy: Roger Keith Coleman, a Virginia man who was convicted of raping and murdering his sister-in-law in 1981. He wound up on the front of Time magazine in 1992. "This man might be innocent," said the dramatic cover line. "This man is due to die." Despite Time's breathless advocacy on Coleman's behalf-- he was described by writer Jill Smolowe as "a poor coal miner, with no spare cash to hire an attorney," as well as the victim of "circumstantial evidence"--Coleman was executed right on schedule. He refused to admit guilt to the bitter end. "An innocent man is going to be murdered tonight," he said as he was being strapped into the electric chair.

After meeting Coleman in 1988, one of the country's most prominent "innocence" crusaders, Jim McCloskey of Centurion Ministries, decided to make Coleman a cause celebre. For the next four years, McCloskey devoted himself to the case. He attempted to poke holes in the theories of prosecutors, complained about the quality of Coleman's defense attorneys, and generated an enormous amount of publicity. "I was with Roger until half an hour before he was executed," says McCloskey. "I really believed he was innocent." On the night of Coleman's death, McCloskey promised the condemned man that he would keep fighting to clear his name, and that's exactly what he did. Coleman's life and death continued to generate interest and controversy. It was the subject of numerous media reports as well as May God Have Mercy, a 1997 book by John C. Tucker that won plaudits from the likes of Scott Turow. ("If you think you believe in the death penalty," wrote Turow in a blurb for the paperback edition, "then you must read John Tucker's lucid, compelling book about blind justice of the wrong kind.")

No legal proceeding is flawless. But in this instance, the jury reached the correct verdict: As new DNA tests released on January 12 demonstrate, Coleman indisputably committed the crimes for which he was executed. "This is a bitter pill to swallow," McCloskey explained in a statement. "Our search for facts can delude us into thinking that what we have found is gold, only to discover that it is in fact fool's gold."

To his credit, McCloskey has discussed the case--and his mistake--openly with reporters (including me) and on his website. Others have been less willing to talk about their role in promoting the cause of a murderer and rapist. "That story was so many years ago, I really don't remember it and don't have anything to say," said former Time writer Jill Smolowe when I contacted her at People, where she now works. (Time ran a small item on Coleman's guilt in its January 23 issue.)

It might be said that Coleman's boosters committed a simple cop mistake: They made an early assumption and stuck with it. That's the chance they take when they personalize these cases. Theirs is a strategy of high risk and high reward. So far, they haven't seen the reward they've sought, but it may be only a matter of time: Their strategy needs to work just once for it to begin having the desired effect on public opinion, which has softened in recent years. (In a 1994 Gallup survey, 80 percent said they supported capital punishment; last year, that figure was 64 percent.) Incontrovertible DNA evidence proving that an innocent person was executed for a crime he did not commit might quickly turn their fool's gold into the real stuff.

The Coleman DNA tests were not the first post-execution tests ever to take place. Six years ago, in a case brought by CBS News and three newspapers, a Georgia judge ordered new exams involving Ellis Wayne Felker, who was executed in 1996 following a rape-and-murder conviction; these were inconclusive. Last year, in a transparent attempt to embarrass President Bush, Barry Scheck of the Cardozo School of Law's Innocence Project (and a former lawyer for O. J. Simpson) asked Texas to permit DNA analysis concerning a man who was executed while Bush was the state's governor.

There is sure to be much more second-guessing in the future: The Coleman revelations were made possible because Mark Warner, the Democratic governor of Virginia, decided just before he left office to allow post-execution testing. He became the first governor in the nation to do so, and other politicians now may feel pressure to follow his lead. Last year, Republican senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania expressed his own misgivings: "I feel very troubled about cases where someone may have been convicted wrongly," he told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "DNA evidence definitely should be used when possible."

The possibility of death-row innocence came to prominence in 2000, when then-governor George Ryan of Illinois placed a moratorium on executions, on the grounds that, in the previous 20 years, the state had exonerated more inmates than it had executed. (The moratorium remains in effect today.) President Bush believed that the problem of imprisoned innocents was important enough to mention in his 2005 State of the Union address: "In America, we must make doubly sure no person is held to account for a crime he or she did not commit--so we are dramatically expanding the use of DNA evidence to prevent wrongful conviction."

Anti-death-penalty groups thrive on the notion that wrongful convictions are common. They compile long rosters of the exonerated; the Death Penalty Information Center, for instance, counts 122 people on its "innocence list." Yet these lists are notoriously unreliable--many of the people on them haven't been proven innocent, but simply sprung free on legal technicalities. Take Harold Wilson, who was placed on death row for killing three people with an ax in 1988. He is the latest person to join the DPIC's innocence list, having been acquitted of these charges last November. "The evidence of his guilt is overwhelming," says Ed McCann, who heads the homicide unit in the Philadelphia district attorney's office. "Anybody who studies the totality of this case can see that." Wilson was originally convicted in part because detectives found a blood-splattered coat in his mother's home. During his sentencing, Wilson even admitted to owning the coat. Years later, after winning a new trial on the basis of a claim that the first prosecutor had tried to keep blacks off the jury, Wilson changed his story. He accused the police of planting the coat, and the judge wouldn't allow his previous admission of owning the coat into the new trial. There were other complications as well. The result, at least in McCann's view, is that a murderer was given his freedom.

If the first episode of In Justice is any indication, the show probably won't feature such complexities. Instead, it will depict simple truths that a flawed criminal-justice system has failed to grasp, without portraying any of the messiness that surrounds real cases of supposed innocence. While it remains to be seen whether the public will have an appetite for such a thing, a successful show doesn't impose its preferences on the public as much as reflect them, or at least some segment of them. Betting that Americans will continue to sour on the death penalty may be an early assumption, but Hollywood may profit by sticking with it.