This 1991 made-for-TV movie opens with a murder in a Brooklyn park.  The year is 1979 and a group of teenagers are accosted by two men carrying guns.  The men rob the teenagers of their drugs and guns.  One person is killed.  When the police arrive, almost everyone says that it was too dark to see anything.  However, a 15 year-old named Jimmy O’Neill (Tristan Tait) says that he saw the faces of the men.

At the police station, the detective (Mark Metcalf) shows him a picture of a man named Billy Ferro (Zachary Mott) and Jimmy identifies him as one of the gunmen.  The detective then produces a picture of a 19 year-old named Bobby McLaughlin (Brendan Fraser) and asks if Bobby was the other man.  When Jimmy hesitates, the detective says that McLaughlin has been arrested with Billy in the past.

Of course, the truth of the matter is that, while Bobby has been arrested in the past, he’s never been arrested for anything as serious as murder and he’s never met Billy Ferro.  The man who had been arrested in the past with Ferro was named Harold McLaughlin.  The detective accidentally grabbed the wrong picture.

Bobby, a high school drop-out who lives with his foster parents (played by Martin Sheen and Caroline Kava), is arrested and charged with second degree murder.  It doesn’t matter that Bobby passes a polygraph because the results are not admissible in court.  It doesn’t matter what Bobby has an alibi because the prosecutor portrays all of his friends as being a collection of stoners and losers.  It doesn’t matter what Bobby has never even met Billy Ferro because Ferro isn’t going to help anyone out, even someone who he knows is being falsely convicted.  Bobby is convicted of second degree murder and sent to prison.

For the next seven years, while Bobby tries to survive prison, his foster father attempts to prove his son’s innocence.  With the police refusing to help, Bobby’s father is forced to launch his own investigation but it seems like no matter what he discovers, it’s not enough to get Bobby out of prison.  Still, neither he nor Bobby gives up.  Neither one will accept a system in which you’re guilty until proven innocent….

For most people who choose to watch this film, I imagine it will be because of that “Introducing Brendan Fraser” credit.  Fraser gives a very good performance in this film, playing Bobby as basically well-meaning but directionless teenager who finds himself trapped in a nightmare.  Of course, the majority of this film is Martin Sheen yelling about the injustice of it all.  This is the type of crusader role that Sheen has played often.  As was often the case when he was cast in films like this, there’s nothing subtle about Sheen’s performance but it’s not really a role that needs or demands subtlety.

Though this was made-for-television and, as such, is never quite as critical of the system as perhaps it should be (if anything, the film argues that one should trust the system to eventually do the right thing, even if it does so seven years too late), it still shows how one cop’s mistake can ruin an innocent’s man life.  It’s all the more effective because it’s based on a true story.  Of course, I immediately knew the cop shouldn’t be trusted because he was played by Mark Metcalf.  Niedermeyer as a cop?  That’s definitely not going to end well.