Framing the Guilty Party



When one comes across a Frame-Up, the usual assumption is that the victim of the frame is innocent. Sometimes, however, this is not the case.

Framing the Guilty Party usually takes three forms:


 * Category 1: You know who the bad guy is, but there's not quite enough evidence to prove it, so the cops/prosecutors either create the evidence or allow someone else to create it and/or perjure themselves in order to convict them. If the Good Guys get away with it because the Bad Guy deserves it, it's Pay Evil Unto Evil.


 * Category 2: Person A frames Person B to cover their own ass...and it turns out that Person B actually was the bad guy who really did commit the crime, or is secretly guilty of similar crimes that he or she isn't suspected of.


 * Category 3: The guilty party plants enough evidence to make themselves a suspect, and either does the frame-up so incompetently that it's obviously a frame-up, or later somehow exposes the "frame-up." The goal of this maneuver is that the guilty party will be put beyond suspicion, on the basis that the real culprit tried to frame someone innocent. This may lead genuine evidence incriminating the guilty party to be disregarded, on the assumption that it was also planted.

Unsurprisingly, while the first form can be considered Truth in Television (how much truth usually depends on what your personal opinion of the police is), the second one is almost always pure fiction, often something of a Contrived Coincidence. If someone trying a category 3 pulls it off, the character is typically on the way to Magnificent Bastard status, although there's always the risk that if the investigators don't fall for the fake frame-up (either by not realizing it's a frame in the first place, or realizing the frame was faked), the perp has provided evidence proving their own guilt, in which case it's more of What an Idiot!.

Compare Bluffing the Murderer/Engineered Public Confession, in which the evidence to convict the guilty party is created by somehow tricking them into doing something revealing rather than via a frame. See also: Frame-Up, for implicating the innocent with false evidence. Category 3 can also overlap with Sarcastic Confession. Someone who takes the frame at face value, and therefore suspects the guilty party, is Right for the Wrong Reasons.

Anime and Manga

 * In the manga Cannon God Exaxxion the invading aliens launch a propaganda campaign to make the human hero seem like a monster using doctored video... which the hero's support squad then counters using doctored video of the aliens making the doctored video.

Comic Books

 * In a variant on the theme in Justice Society of America, Wildcat reveals he once framed a man for the murder of his own family, because the man had, in retribution, killed the actual murderer and his innocent family, but there wasn't a way to get (or apparently plant) the evidence linking him to the crime of killing the other family. It's still played as being an act of Moral Dissonance for Wildcat, and he pays for it with.
 * In Watchmen, Rorschach is framed ; he is guilty of vigilantism and violating the Super Registration Act.
 * He is also guilty of murdering at least two people other than the man he was framed for killing.
 * Judge Dredd of all people does this. He knows the Mechanismo project is incredibly risky and has seen first hand the danger of robot judges to the city. When tracking a rogue Mark I robojudge, Dredd is beaten to it by one of the new Mark II models. After the Mark II ignores Dredd's order to hold its fire, Dredd destroys the Mark II and persuades the only witness to say that the Mark I destroyed the Mark II and that Dredd destroyed the Mark I. It was noted as a rare Out-of-Character Moment for Dredd, though his fears were later justified.
 * A variant happened in Diabolik. A rich man had ended paralized and unable to do more than blink after his wife and her lover attempted to murder him. When Diabolik steals a collection of jewels from him, they meet and the man manage to ask him to euthanize and avenge him by blinking in morse code (Diabolik caught on this only because he once did the same thing to give Eva a message while standing trial). Diabolik decided to do so, and, after stealing the jewels, waits for the wife and her lover to be out of the house to enter masked as the lover and with Eva masked as the wife to murder him on camera and declaring they were doing it to complete the attempted murder that had left him paralized. Then, as the wife and her lover are arrested, Altea, the fiancee of inspector Ginko and a childhood friend of that man, finds evidence they couldn't have done the murder, but, knowing they had attempted to kill her friend and unable to prove it, destroys the evidence.

Film

 * The film Guilty as Sin where a lawyer discovers that her client really DID commit the murder - not for gain, but simply to see if he could pull it off. And so he did, without leaving a shred of evidence behind. She uses the details of the murder that he told her, to fabricate bits of evidence that COULD have existed (if he hadn't disposed of it), and then anonymously arranges for the prosecution to find it.
 * Used to great effect in Touch of Evil, where this is the main strategy of corrupt cop Hank Quinlan. "How many did you frame?" "Nobody that wasn't guilty!"
 * And funnily enough, the guy in the film that he was obviously trying to frame really WAS guilty.
 * Mentioned in L.A. Confidential. Captain Smith tells Lt. Exley that Exley's not ready to be a detective precisely because he wouldn't be willing to frame a suspect he knew to be guilty.
 * We have another example in the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate.
 * It's Det. Dormer's past sin in Insomnia
 * At the end of Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans, the protagonist goes into business with the drug kingpin whom he knows (but can't prove) committed the quintuple murder he's investigating,.
 * The premise of Fritz Lang's noir classic Beyond A Reasonable Doubt is an innocent man framing himself for a capital crime, with the intent of proving his own innocence at the last second in order to make a dramatic case against the death penalty. Things don't quite go as planned.

Literature
""Who will listen to the dead? We who died so that words could fly demand Justice now...""
 * Happens in Val Mcdermid's A Place of Execution, where the man being framed for murder actually hasn't killed anyone, but is a multiple child rapist.
 * Moist von Lipwig in Going Postal frames  It should be noted that this in and of itself isn't treated as "proof" of wrongdoing; however, nobody catches Moist in the act, and the event triggers an investigation which leads to the gathering of proper evidence.
 * Just one of many Crowning Moments Of Awesome for Moist.


 * Moist has just a way of doing it.. he sort of does that in Making Money too.
 * In the X Wing Series, a thoroughly unpleasant Imperial scientist is captured by the New Republic. She strikes a deal with them - if she tells them what she knows, she gets amnesty, a new identity, and half a million credits, and since the New Republic is the good guys, they keep the deal. She's to be set free on Coruscant with that last after swearing that she wouldn't just head back to the Empire and resume her work, but everyone knows that's exactly what she'll do. However, she also insists on being paid in Imperial credits - and when the customs official finds them she's arrested, because carrying that much enemy currency is not only illegal smuggling, but sedition. She's then locked away.
 * Lawrence Block's Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries end like this all the time. It helps that main character (and professional thief) Bernie has Corrupt Cop Ray Kirschmann as a close personal friend.

Live Action TV
"Jake: ''Sometimes the law can be tricky, criminals can be protected by the truth. So sometimes lying is the only way for justice to be servered. The opinions in there were not "murder" or "manslaughter" as a charge. It was "aquittal" or "manslaughter". Yes he got less then he deserved, and yes we committed a crime to do this, but in the end, he got use as soon as he asked for immunity...when we agreed that was when we made it impossible to try him as a murderer. He knew that Coombs was dead before making that plea, that's why he made it...he trapped use...and that's what happens in court sometimes...in the end, we just made the best outcome that be made from the sisuation.""
 * Frequently seen on Law and Order when the prosecutors are tempted to put someone on the stand whom they know (or believe) will commit perjury in order to implicate the accused.
 * Category three is utilized in the Law and Order: Criminal Intent episode "Eosphoros" (fittingly, since the show is more psychological and frequently deals with self-styled Magnificent Bastards and Chessmasters). The killer intentionally plants evidence against him,(his fingerprints on a packet of ketchup that was at the crime scene) then gave the detectives a prepared explanation for it. This almost succeeded in getting him off the hook too.
 * An interesting twist in one episode had a cop charged with a crime threaten to claim to have planted evidence in a large number of cases (thereby opening them up for appeal) unless the prosecutors let him off.
 * This is played in the Law and Order UK verion. The episode "emmune", features a killer who pleads immunity from being prosecuted on murder charges due to him being the only one to know a missing man's wearabouts and thus he is the protected from getting done when a missing man might be saved from death by said criminal. The lead prosecutor and defence agree However, upon the discovery of the missing man's body it's obvious that the detectives and lead prosecutor have been screwed over, because it's the defendant HAD to have known about the fact that the missing man was dead. The lead detective rushes to the trial to tell the head prosecuor that they have found the body of the missing man and that the guy was clearly murdered. Upon this, the lead prosecutor tries to get the immunity agreement overturned however he is told that the only way he can get it over turned is if the missing man whom is connected to the defendant was not murdered as this means the the defendant was misleading them from his previous testimony. The prosecutor says that the death was accidental manslaughter trying to get the immunity overturned however it's revealed it was murder AFTER the immunity was overturned so it seems like the immunity must stand. The defense attorney says that she say the lead detective talking to the prosecutor about the death of the missing man before he pleaded for the overturn of the immunity agreement therefore he obviously know it had to be murder before the plea was overturned therefore the overturn does not stand. The prosecutor, knowing without a doubt that the defendant is the killer, wants to see him get his just desserts. So he call the head detective to testify that the he had accidenly forgotten to tell the prosecutor that the missing man had been murdered and only that they had found his dead body (of course this is a lie), therefore the lead prosecutor assumped the death to be accidental. Upon this, hearing this false testimony, the immunity is overturned by the judge who the fact that the immunity is based on manslaugter, the killer can only be tried for this crime, and not murder. When asked if he thinks they did the right thing, the head prosecutor says that the way it ended was the only way it could have ended:


 * Used in The Wire when McNulty and Bunk put Omar Little on the stand, knowing that he will perjure himself to convict Bird in retaliation for Bird's torture of Omar's boyfriend. Everyone on both sides of the case knows Omar is lying - everyone except the jury.
 * Sam does this on at least two occasions in Life On Mars to prevent future crimes, and in both cases, his initial sense of rightness is subverted when in a Prophecy Twist, the events of the future end up happening because of his actions.
 * However if Gene Hunt tries this Sam argues that it's highly unethical. Of course, on at least one occasion Hunt—who is taking the By-The-Book Cop role for a change—notes the blatant hypocrisy at work.
 * Well Hunt hasn't seen the future has he?
 * The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed: Zheglov frames known thief Brick to get valuable information from him.
 * Similar to the Life On Mars example Alex does this in Ashes to Ashes again to prevent a future crime. Ray also does this and unlike Life On Mars no one criticizes it, but then this time they'd actually caught the guy red handed.
 * An odd partial example occurs in the made-for-TV A Slight Case of Murder. Partial because the detective a) and b).
 * Sort of happened in the Monk episode  
 * A version is present in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. There's no denying that the Dominion is a threat, but the Romulans have a non-aggression pact with them. Sisko, at Garak's urging and with his help, at first tries to convince a Romulan senator to join the cause with fake evidence that the Dominion will be coming for the Romulans soon rather than trying to make peace. Found out, he braces for the Romulans rejecting an alliance or even joining the Dominion...and then a bomb destroys the Senator's shuttle with him aboard, apparently Dominion-made and providing imperfections to the evidence that would explain their seeming falsity. Garak, knowing it would eventually come to that, had planted the bomb in order to frame the Dominion for assassinating a prominent Romulan.
 * ...which mirrors the Real Life Reichstag fire, which fully galvanized the German populace into accepting the Nazi party over the German Communist Party.
 * In the two part tv movie Secret Smile, Miranda, played by Kat Ashfield is haunted by her psychotic ex-boyfriend. After she dumps him, he gets engaged to her sister, manipulates her teenage brother into commiting suicide, dumps her sister at the altar to mary Miranda's best friend instead, and then murders the best friend and gets away with it. At her wits end, she enlists the help of his current abused girlfriend and manages to frame him with
 * Shark did this to a Serial Killer. Small subversion in that the supposed victim in this case actually committed suicide (but the killer had killed many women and continued to get away with it.)
 * One of the Strike Team's favorite moves on The Shield. One egregious example is when they kidnap a Los Angeles serial killer and take him to Mexico to frame him on a gun charge, then burn his driver's license so he can't come back. Then, it is subverted hard when a fanatical IAD Detective plants evidence on Mackey, but has a crisis of conscience and turns himself in.
 * Dark Angel: A gangster commits murder by throwing his victim out of a window, thus making it look like suicide. Logan conspires with the coroner to put at cap in the corpse's head, then has Max plant the murder weapon on the gangster as he attempts to leave the country.
 * Used on an episode of CSI when Catherine, Liev Schreiber's character, Brass and McKeen fake the murder of a snitch so the forensics will point at a suspected murderer. The goal is get murderer to unwittingly reveal evidence for the murders he actually did commit. Although it still sort-of works, the three of them end up being yelled at by an irate prosecutor, judge, and their own team members for the stunt.
 * To clarify, although the rest of the team discovers the conspiracy (though they think its Internal Affairs messing with them), the group are still able to nab the perp because he really was stupid enough to fall for it. It falls apart because McKeen was supposed to let the judge and D.A. in on the scheme but neglected to do so . They still get the bad guy though, as it turned out he was the killer of the B-plot as well, and they had stronger evidence pinning him for that crime.
 * Another episode has Catherine reopening the cold case of a man her detective mentor got put in jail for murder, after the man, terminally ill, confesses to a different murder but protests his innocence of the one he was convicted of, that of Catherine's best friend Stephanie. It turns out Tadero, the detective, planted evidence because the DA had released the suspect even though he boasted to Tadero of having roughed her up. Catherine calls him out in a big way and is forced to have Tadero arrested for it, pointing out the flaw in his justification: Even though the guy was guilty, Stephanie's real murderer still got away.
 * Yet another episode had a badly burnt body being found inside the chimney of a guy previously found suspect of the murder of a teenage girl years earlier. The body is initially identified as belonging to the man's son and during the course of the investigation, the corpse of the teenager is also found. However, the son turns up alive prompting the question as to who the burned corpse was. Turns out the teenager's father stole the corpse from a morgue in order to get the house investigated so that his daughter's body would be found and her killer brought to justice.
 * The hero does this almost every episode in Burn Notice. He's probably committed more crimes then many of the villains, but it's all for a good cause.
 * Interestingly done in a recent episode where he was making an underling look like an undercover cop to the boss so that the boss would kill him for them. Subverted when the underling actually was an undercover FBI agent, and Mike now had to save him from the frame job.
 * In one episode, a criminal steals a car full of drugs from his boss, and tries to frame someone for it by planting the car on their property. Michael figures it out in time, and sneaks the car back onto the criminal's property just in time for his boss to see it.
 * In CSI: NY, Aiden Burn breaks the seal on a piece of evidence intending to plant it to incriminate a serial rapist after the victim who could have identified him backed down. Her conscience prevents her from going through with it and she confesses to her boss, Mac Taylor - but because she's already contaminated the evidence, he has to fire her.
 * Done in The Thin Blue Line episode "Court In The Act": Inspector Grim is desperate to convict a drug dealer; his subordinate Boyle suggests that evidence can be found -- "found", in inverted commas. Inspector Fowler found out about the frame up and, unable to prove the drug dealer had been framed, he  Off on a Technicality.
 * Felicia Tillman pulls this in Desperate Housewives; she knows Paul Young murdered her sister, but can't prove it without exposing her sister as the blackmailer who drove Mary Alice Young to suicide and revealing Zach Young's true identity. Instead, she tries to threaten him and scare him into skipping town (leaving Zach behind with her), then tries to have him killed, but both of these plans fail, so she spends several weeks draining her own blood bit by bit, sprays it around Paul's house and car, then chops off two of her own fingers and leaves them in his trunk before tipping off the cops. Needless to say, he's arrested and charged with her murder.
 * One episode of CSI: Miami features a cop who is so convinced of a person's guilt in a series of murders that he murders someone else (Santana from Glee!) in order to provide the evidence needed to implicate them. Except the suspect turned out to be innocent.
 * Terriers: In the pilot, the PI heroes figure out that a local developer had two people killed to get hold of an incriminating video. He's well-connected and the police are reluctant to go after him, so they plant the murder weapon in his desk drawer to get him arrested. The trouble really starts when the developer starts trying to prove the gun was planted...
 * And again in "Change Partners": Ray, a fellow thief from Britt's past, wants Britt to work with him again. He's recently robbed a bar, so Britt and Hank stage a second robbery and this time leave evidence pointing to Ray.
 * One of the standard tactics played by the Impossible Missions Force was to set up the target so the people the target worked for or with was convinced they were being betrayed or conned by the target, and letting them do the dirty work of the actual elimination.
 * This is done by Columbo in nearly every case, though usually as a Bluffing the Murderer tactic.
 * When the Leverage team can't prove the mark's guilt, they resort to this.
 * Out-of-court example in House: A patient with Munchausen's (an disorder where the patient takes meds to fake illnesses) is discharged, but House thinks she has an underlying condition that doesn't show up enough, and gives her a drug to make it more obvious.

Theatre

 * A hilarious version of this occurs in the play and movie Arsenic and Old Lace, where the protagonist, Mortimer Brewster, must trick his sweet old aunts into committing themselves to a mental institution to prevent them from being arrested for the multiple murders they have committed and buried in their basement. The situation gets even more complicated when his Ax Crazy brother Jonathan shows up and tries to drop off one of his dead bodies.

Video Games

 * Oblivion's thief guild mission had you framing the one behind a theft that they set up a false commission for. You plant it in the traitor's house and then sic the guards on them.
 * The traitor to the Dark Brotherhood, on the other hand, is quite successful at framing Lucien Lachance for the murder of the majority of the Black Hand. It's this trope because Lucien's job is to murder people, he was just accused of murdering the wrong people.
 * A case in the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series shows the possible consequences of this trope.
 * The first case of the fourth game, Apollo Justice, plays it straight:
 * Also played straight in Trials and Tribulations, in which
 * It turns up another time as well, with
 * In Knights of the Old Republic, your investigation reveals that a key piece of evidence was planted by the Sith. However, if you dig deep enough, you learn that the Republic stole a video recording showing that Sunry is guilty as charged.
 * In Saints Row: The Third, the S.T.A.G. Initiative is sent to put a stop to the gang violence by declaring martial law in the city. To be fair, the player-character is pretty much somewhere between Sociopathic Hero, Psycho for Hire, and Axe Crazy. However,, and whether it succeeds or not is up to the player.

Real Life

 * Possible Real Life example with OJ Simpson. Illegal searches made much of the evidence against him questionable, along with the allegedly planted blood on the sock (among other things). More than anything else, this belief along with the Mark Furhman involvement probably led to his acquittal. This assumes of course that he actually did it.
 * The blood pattern soaked through the sock, one side to the other side, before drying. This made the blood look planted. Other problems were blood found with preservative in it, 1.5 cc of Simpson's blood disappearing from the police's vial, an officer driving around with the vial of blood and taking it to Simpson's house, Mark Fuhrman gleefully bragging in gutter language about the things he'd done to "niggers" including planting evidence. In a way the Simpson case could be seen as a Real Life Deconstruction of this.
 * Parallel construction is alleged to sometimes be this. The short version:
 * The police obtain a tip based on, for example, warrantless (illegal) surveillance by the NSA.
 * They perform a "random" stop that "happens" to catch a criminal in the act.
 * They prosecute without mentioning step 1.

Anime and Manga

 * In one of the episodes of Detective Conan, the killer is a woman named Tina. Her boyfriend found the crime scene and saw that the victim wrote "Tina" in his own blood as he lay dying, so the boyfriend changed the message to "Ringo", hoping to deflect all suspicion onto an innocent person who probably wouldn't have an alibi. Then Ringo found the crime scene and changed the message again to point to... you guessed it.
 * Well, this example is kinda marginal, in that the alteration was to the phrase "shrine god," and it could only have pointed back to the killer in a roundabout way. I don't believe he was thinking of it that way when he altered the dying message.

Comic Books

 * In Alan Moore's From Hell, the Queen's personal psychic attempts to frame her official doctor for the Ripper murders because he insulted him. It turns out that the doctor really is Jack the Ripper.

Film

 * In No Way Out, Commander Farrell's girlfriend is killed accidentally by the Secretary of Defense, who blames a Soviet spy, setting off a Pentagon Witch Hunt. Farrell has to find proof who the real killer was before evidence turns up showing he had slept with her, and thus be accused...not only because he didn't commit the crime but because
 * There's a double use as well, since the man who ends up being blamed for the killing (the politician's aide) was not actually guilty of that (or of being a mole), but had committed multiple illegal acts in the course of the coverup including at least one actual murder, and is the primary villain of the movie.
 * A slight variant of Category 2 is in the film Beyond A Reasonable Doubt. A crusading newspaper editor (John Mc Intire) wants to prove that the death penalty can cause an innocent man to be executed. He hatches a bizarre plot with his star reporter (Dana Andrews): the editor will plant false evidence indicating that the reporter is guilty of a recent unsolved sex murder. After the reporter is arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death, the editor will come forward with proof that the evidence was falsified, forcing the authorities to release the reporter. Amazingly enough, the reporter agrees to this. The first twist comes when the editor is killed in an accident, and the evidence destroyed, before he can clear the reporter. The second twist comes when it develops that the reporter is the actual murderer.

Literature

 * In Martha Wells's The Death of the Necromancer, one of the villains framed an innocent man for murder and necromancy. As a consequence, the hero spends the novel trying to frame him, so that he too will be executed for a crime he didn't commit.
 * Donald Westlake wrote a novella called A Travesty that has the murderer (also the narrator) being framed for the murder he committed.

Live Action TV

 * In the new Battlestar Galactica Reimagined pilot miniseries, Baltar, desperate to get any hint of involvement in the Cylon attack off himself, randomly picks someone who was standing on the bridge as being a Cylon. Guess what?
 * Later in the first season, a Cylon agent gives the fleet doctored photos of Baltar tampering with the Colonial defense mainframe, thereby facilitating the genocide of mankind. When the frame-up is discovered, Baltar's actual indirect role in providing the Cylons access to the defense network remained unknown until the late third season. And even then no-one can prove it, so very few people know about it in the first place (they find other things he has done to go after him). No one actually has hard, non drug based vision evidence of his wrongdoing until he confesses to someone halfway through the final season.
 * Eventually, Baltar is put on trial for the Cylons' disastrous occupation of New Caprica. It really was his fault, but not for the reason they think. The witnesses have to resort to perjury to make the case against him, as none of the prosecutors know what he's actually guilty of, and he's ultimately acquitted.
 * In Spooks it's revealed that Adam Carter once infiltrated Syrian intelligence. A Syrian officer was close to exposing him, so Adam fabricated evidence that the officer was an Israeli mole. As it turned out, he was one. Oops.
 * Similarly, in an episode of Burn Notice, Michael tries to get into a villian's good graces by convincing him that his Dragon is actually an undercover cop. He finds it surprisingly easy since, as he later learns, the guy is an undercover cop. Being good guys, Michael and the gang take it upon themselves to both save his life and complete the job.

Video Games

 * Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney had this in case 4 of "Justice for All". Phoenix at first believes that Adrian Andrews must be the killer because she purposly tried to pin the blame of the crime onto someone else by planting evidence and lying on the stand.

Tabletop Games

 * Lots of frameups in the roleplaying game Paranoia (which specifically encourages frameups) wind up being Category 2, just because everyone is guilty of something.

Web Comics

 * A variant occurred in a Something Positive story arc. Kharisma had been trying to kill a very rich, very evil, and very old man because he made a bet with her: if she managed to kill him within a certain time period, she would inherit all his money. He survives all of her murder attempts because he's just that evil, only to die of natural causes just before the time limit expired. However, she is arrested and convicted of his murder anyway. And she doesn't help herself by bragging about the bet every chance she got...
 * In Kevin and Kell, Angelique and Kevin's father try to frame each other for killing Sid, and both are convinced the other did it..

Western Animation

 * Archer:
 * In the premiere episode, there is a double-whammy example of this trope. The eponymous secret agent wants to erase the fact that he's been misappropriating government funds to fuel his playboy lifestyle, so he hastily contrives a reason that might convince others to let him secretly access the mainframe: "I'm on a mole-hunt!" It doesn't work as intended. Instead, this causes the real mole to make a run for it, pay for his getaway using Archer's account and ultimately get blamed for ALL of Archer's financial discrepancies.
 * Also in Archer, our "hero" is accused of fathering an illegitimate son with a prostitute. His blood is drawn for the paternity test, but he secretly swaps the sample with blood from his co-worker so that the sample won't match the child's DNA. It turns out that his co-worker was the real father, making the samples match and everyone believe that Archer is the father.

Real Life

 * May have happened in the real-life murder of Sunny von Bulow. The legal team, desperate to find out that the man they were representing (Sunny's husband Claus) was not a hopelessly amoral killer, were pleased to discover persuasive logic that a key piece of evidence against Claus had been fabricated - most likely planted by Sunny's family, who hated Claus and were convinced of his guilt. It brought them low again when they realised that this didn't mean he didn't do it; the family may well have simply framed a guilty man.
 * Mob hit man (and later informant) Donald Frankos claims that he was convicted of a murder he didn't really commit on the basis of perjured eyewitness testimony. According to him, he always wore a disguise when committing contract killings. In his memoir, he dryly notes that "if I had done it, he wouldn't have been able to identify me" would not have made a good defense in court.

Anime and Manga

 * In Detective Conan, one murderer drew a letter on the wall pointing towards herself in the victims blood, but the victim was killed instantly and thus couldn't possibly have drawn it. This also allowed her to use her own skeet shooting gun without worrying about fingerprints (since anyone in the club could have accessed it) or gun powder residue (since she had used it earlier anyway).
 * Another made it look like he had killed the victim (a fairly accomplished swordsman) in a swordfight by cutting up the room (cutting way to much and too random while purposfully leaving a certain statue intact to implicate another suspect) and leaving a sword clenched (the wrong way) in the victims hands. This was also done in an attempt to hide the dying message left by the victim while his back was turned.

Film

 * This trope makes up the twist ending to Fritz Lang's last American film,.
 * The Life Of David Gale has an alternate motive for this:
 * The Spanish film Killing Words is about a professor who makes it look like his ex-wife has framed him for her murder and skipped town, when in reality he murdered her.

Literature

 * Pretty much the central premise of Agatha Christie's, where the murderer goes to elaborate lengths to frame himself for the murder of his wife, acting shifty, having public tiffs with her, being seen purchasing the poison, openly enjoying his newfound wealth etc... albeit keeping a rock solid alibi up his sleeve. The plan was to get speedily tried on a wave of public outcry, whip out the alibi at the last second, be found innocent on that shocking revelation alone, then be forevermore protected by the Double Jeopardy rule (in Anglo-Saxon law, one can't be tried for the same crime twice). Hercule Poirot foils this plan by refusing to allow the man's arrest until he has true evidence of his guilt.
 * Also, in, culminating in a complex double set of framing: first the real killer framed himself, clumsily, and then put together a much more professional set of planted evidence pointing at someone else. The desired end result was that the second suspect would be hanged for murder; the actual murder victim was only a means to an end.
 * The Klatchian agents in Jingo plant sand and Klatchian coins at a crime scene to convince Vimes they weren't involved. Sure enough, when Vimes reads Colon's report, he sarcastically comments "All that's missing is the box of dates and the camel under the pillow!"
 * In John Le Carre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the hero is sent by MI6 to East Germany to frame East German spycatcher Mundt as a British mole.
 * In The Krytos Trap, Tycho stands trial for  murder. The evidence against him is overwhelming, but both sides suspect that much of it was manufactured by Imperial Intelligence. The question is whether he is innocent and made too look guilty by a frame, or guilty and made to look innocent by a "clumsy" frame. In the end, the victim was alive the whole time (The Imperials faked his death and took him prisoner) and.
 * In At All Costs, Havenite politician plants obviously manufactured evidence that (correctly) names him as the one responsible for altering diplomatic correspondence which started the war all over again. Fortunately, the Pritchart administration picks up on this fact and never makes the evidence public.
 * Subverted in Jade Dragon, where The Shadow investigates a frame-up so obvious the authorities will likely conclude the man is innocent, but a sleuth who goes a step further soon realizes that's exactly how a clever enough criminal could get away with murder. The real crook, though, went a step further than *that*, adding increasingly subtle evidence against the guy...

Live Action TV

 * The episode "The Mind of Stefan Miklos" of Mission Impossible had a two-for-one variation: the Americans have been using a foreign spy by feeding him bad information, but another spy (Carnaby) in the ring is a rival and discovers proof the information is bad, accusing the first of being a double-agent. The investigator, Miklos, who the enemy is sending to ferret out the truth is believed to be far too competent to fall for an attempt to frame the accuser, so instead the team frames the first agent, depending on Miklos to see through their con, and come to the conclusion that the only reason the Americans would go to so much trouble was to discredit the information he had passed on. As a bonus, the failed frame-up implicates Carnaby as having been involved, leading to a Category 1 variation since Miklos concludes that he must be a double agent.
 * In an early episode of Monk, there is a morbidly obese crime lord named Dale the Whale who has a minion murder a judge and then set up a great frame job so it looks like Dale did it himself, including a 911 call fingering him as the murderer and a witness who saw an extremely obese person on the premises. This is completely impossible, because not only is Dale too fat to move, he couldn't even fit through the victim's door if he could.

Video Games

 * An example can be found in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Justice for All: case number.

Literature

 * In Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire,

Live Action TV

 * Averted in Justified: Raylan finds a witness to one of Boyd's crimes (who had previously refused to give evidence) and intimidates him into testifying, but stops cold when the witness asks for a picture so he knows who he's supposed to implicate. Turns out he didn't give a vague description because he was scared; he genuinely didn't get a good look. When he offers to commit perjury to help Raylan put Boyd back in jail, Raylan immediately turns him down.
 * In one episode of Hustle, a crooked DI tried to extort 10 grand off a friend of the team, so they gave her the perfect opportunity to extort them - that she would get the proceeds of their con, or she'd call the cops on them. Except, of course, they rigged it so all the evidence would point to her pulling off the con by herself, and then called the cops on her. Her original wrongdoing is never brought up.
 * This was used  in an episode of Law and Order SVU called "Repression." An 18 year old girl recovered memories of her father molesting her when she was young and planted images of child pornagraphy in her youngest sister's room, in the hopes that it would be enough to get him in prison.

Theatre

 * In Chicago, one application of this trope gets two murderesses off the hook.

Web Comics

 * In one Schlock Mercenary arc, the good guys blew up a reality TV network, and planted evidence to frame its CEO for the disaster. They would have gotten away with it, but someone else planted even more evidence, framing them for being in cahoots with the (actually innocent) CEO. They had a lot of trouble defending themselves against the false charges, because if they gave their real alibi they would have revealed their real crimes.

Western Animation

 * Sort of used on American Dad!, when a series of improbable events happened to make Stan look like a wife-beating child molester. Stan's solution was to find somebody who, while innocent, deserved the punishment anyway. They wound up framing it on a co-worker of Roger's who had screwed him over. The fact that the police found (legal) neo-Nazi apparel—and that the detective in charge of the case was a Holocaust survivor—was a rather handy bonus.
 * Another bonus: Stan specifically describes his plan in a way that seems to point to the U.S. overthrowing Saddam Hussein, who likewise deserved to get overthrown even though he was innocent of the specific crime he was accused of.