frameup

frame-up

A situation manipulated so that an innocent person appears to have committed a crime (so that the actual criminal can avoid blame or detection). A: "It's a frame-up, officer, I swear! I would never go to a seedy place like that!" B: "Oh yeah? Then why did we find your fingerprints there?"
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

frame

1. tv. to cause an innocent person to be blamed for a crime; to contrive evidence so that someone appears to be guilty. (Originally underworld.) Jimmy tried to frame his sister for painting the cat yellow.
2. and frame-up and frameup n. a scheme where an innocent person is made to take the blame for something; incrimination caused by contrived evidence. (Underworld.) The frame-up would have worked if it weren’t for one little thing.

frame-up

verb
See frame

frameup

verb
See frame
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions
See also:
  • frame-up
  • framing
  • frame (one)
  • frame (someone) for (something)
  • swear down
  • clean hands, have
  • have clean hands
  • swear
  • swear (that) black is white
  • swear black is white
References in periodicals archive
At his trial at Liverpool Crown Court, Simms claimed he was the victim of an elaborate frameup in which someone had managed to break into his pub while he was upstairs, murder Helen, dress himself in his clothes, steal his car to take the body away and then bring it back later unnoticed and breaking back into the pub to return the car keys.
Helen's body still missing in death mystery
(5) The NKVD employment of Spanish Stalinists like Victori Sala, a key figure in the attempted frameup of the POUM, while they were in exile in Mexico during World War II, was exposed by Venona.
Three Gentlemen of Venona
During the late 1930s, for example, he defended the Moscow Trials, a judicial frameup of certain Soviet leaders who Joseph Stalin wanted out of the way.
Requiem for a freedom fighter
Six years of appeals followed involving substantial allegations of juror misconduct,(55) witness tampering,(56) evidence fabrication,(57) and judicial misconduct.(58) Eventually, someone else claimed to have committed the crime.(59) Throughout the proceedings, local immigrant and anarchist groups treated the case as a frameup and fought for the defendants.
Stories of Scottsboro
Radelet, a University of Florida sociologist, Bedau, a Tufts University professor of philosophy, and Putnam, a Boston-area writer, have compiled a ghastly collection of horror stories - cases of mistaken identity, innocent error, deliberate frameup, excessive prosecutorial zeal, and police malfeasance.
Capital Punishment in America
Like their colleagues tagged in the Delos Santos killing, Arquilita and Perez were indicted for murder, torture and frameup.
Kian, Carl, 'Kulot' slays: Only 5 cops on trial; chiefs promoted
(8) See, as an introduction, Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill 1987), 128-163; Max Shachtman, Behind the Moscow Trial: The Greatest Frameup in History (New York 1936); John Dewey, et al., Not Guilty: Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made Against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials (New York 1938).
Race and revolution