United States

A U.S. government program that forcibly removed thousands of Native American children from their families for adoption by white families between 1958 and 1967.

The WikiLeaks case is the U.S. federal prosecution of Julian Assange for conspiracy to obtain and disclose classified national defense information through WikiLeaks in 2010.

The Tony Alamo Christian Ministries case is a U.S. federal child sex trafficking case in which cult leader Tony Alamo was convicted in 2009 of transporting minors across state lines for sex.

The Unabomber case is a U.S. domestic terrorism campaign in which Harvard-educated mathematician Theodore Kaczynski killed 3 and injured 23 with mail bombs between 1978 and 1995.

The R. Kelly case is a U.S. federal sexual-abuse and trafficking case in which R&B singer Robert Sylvester Kelly was convicted in 2021 and 2022 of racketeering, Mann Act violations and child-pornography offenses.

The Opioid Crisis Case refers to Purdue Pharma's 2020 federal guilty plea in New Jersey for conspiracy and kickback offenses tied to deceptive opioid marketing across the United States.

Mongiello v. Pizza Hut is a US civil patent-infringement lawsuit in which inventor Anthony Mongiello alleged Pizza Hut's stuffed-crust pizza copied his 1987 patent.

The Boy Scouts of America abuse scandal is a decades-long nationwide pattern of child sexual abuse involving 92,700 claims, resolved through a $2.46 billion bankruptcy settlement in April 2023.

The Jeffrey Epstein case is a US sex trafficking case in which financier Jeffrey Epstein abused dozens of underage girls at his Florida and New York homes between at least 2002 and 2005.

Selected by the truecrime.news editorial team as the cases that most powerfully exposed the systemic failures behind wrongful convictions, this list spans two nations and decades of injustice — from fabricated evidence and coerced confessions to tunnel-vision investigations and prosecutorial misconduct.