The most idealistic view of American justice remains the assertion of Benjamin Franklin in 1785 that it would be better to let a hundred guilty persons go free than to let one innocent person suffer.

Things haven't always worked out that way over the last 235 years, a truth underscored again by The Innocence Files, a nine-part documentary premiering Wednesday on Netflix.

The Innocence Files, whose first three episodes are directed by Roger Ross Williams, begins by visiting several cases in which the organization The Innocence Project has uncovered evidence that the wrong people have spent years or decades in jail for crimes they did not commit.

The Innocence Project does not argue that the prison doors should be thrown open, and everyone sent home. It does find systematic abuse that it suggests probably taints more convictions than ever get reviewed.

The Project gets several thousand letters a year from inmates and families and reports that it takes about one percent of their cases. The lawyers and investigators say that while they choose cases on the basis of potential errors, they start with no assumption that their new client is either guilty or not guilty.

The Innocence Files is as methodical as the organization's investigators. It recounts the original crime through narration and whatever real-life footage is available, mercifully not relying on stilted re-creations.

It follows the principals through trial, conviction, and incarceration, focusing on those areas of the prosecution that may later be called into question.

Wherever possible, Williams' team interviews suspects, inmates, prosecutors, defense attorneys, witnesses, and jurors, giving these cases a broad, satisfying context.

The first case here, which runs through the first two episodes, revisits the 1990 and 1992 sexual assault/murders of two 3-year-old girls in Mississippi.

It's hard to imagine more appalling crimes, and The Innocence Files does not sensationalize them beyond what they are. It focuses on how, in both cases, police quickly arrested local men: Leroy Brooks, who knew the first girl's family, and Kennedy Brewer, the boyfriend of the second girl's mother.

While there was a sort-of witness in Brooks' case – the victim's 5-year-old sister, who, among other things, said the man left in an airplane – both were convicted largely on the forensic testimony of Richard West, a dentist who said he found bite marks on both girls that matched the teeth of the defendants.

Jurors, in both cases, say Dr. West's testimony is what clinched it for them. His assertion of an absolute match, they say, convinced them no one else could have done it.

Brooks got life imprisonment. Brewer was sentenced to death. Years later, Brewer wrote to the Innocence Project, which took his case and then approached Brooks after wondering why the Mississippi police never seemed to think the same man could have committed these two remarkably identical crimes.

The second episode of The Innocence Files follows Project co-founder Barry Scheck and his associate Vanessa Potkin as they explore that possibility and also question the reliability of Dr. West's testimony.

Their doubts deepen as they keep looking, and in the end, they feel vindicated enough for Scheck to cast much wider doubt on the procedures and evidence commonly used in criminal trials.

The Innocence Files, it's true, does constitute yet another case where white lawyers belatedly right an injustice that was committed upon black men.

Past films have taken some criticism for that, and Williams may have those responses in mind as he works to keep this documentary's focus on larger issues of injustice permeating the whole legal system.

There can't be much argument that spending 15 to 18 years at Mississippi's Parchman Farm, when you were guilty of no crime, makes a compelling case for Benjamin Franklin's point.