NEW YORK, NY.- Ofra Bikel, a crusading filmmaker for PBS’ “Frontline” investigative series whose documentaries about the criminal justice system in the United States exposed deep flaws in the convictions of 13 people, died Aug. 11 at her home in Tel Aviv, Israel. She was 94.

Her niece, Tamar Ichilov, confirmed the death. Bikel left no immediate survivors.

After making an eclectic mix of “Frontline” documentaries, including ones about the war in El Salvador, people older than 75 who were beset with spiraling medical costs and the Solidarity movement in Poland, Bikel’s focus shifted mainly to criminal justice cases.

“I hate injustice,” Bikel told The New York Times in 2005. “It just bugs me.”

One case, in particular, consumed her for seven years.

In 1990, she started looking into a case in Edenton, North Carolina, where seven people, including Bob and Betsy Kelly, a married couple who owned the Little Rascals Day Care Center, were charged with sexually abusing 29 children.

Bob Kelly was convicted and received 12 consecutive life sentences, but his conviction was overturned. His wife pleaded no contest after 30 months in jail. The other five defendants, including three of the Kellys’ employees, also spent long periods in prison before their releases.

The case, which lacked physical and conclusive medical evidence, relied on testimony from many children whom defense lawyers said had been manipulated by therapists.

In three documentaries that aired in 1991, 1993 and 1997, collectively known as the “Innocence Lost” series, Bikel interviewed jurors, defendants, parents, defense lawyers and the district attorney in the case. She raised doubts about the validity of the prosecution’s case and detailed examples of juror bias (one admitted to her that he had been abused as a child, which most likely would have disqualified him). She also questioned the actions of panicked parents in an atmosphere that she compared to the Salem witch trials.

“Our doubts just built over time,” Rachel Dretzin, associate producer of the first two documentaries, said in a phone interview. “It was never clear that nothing happened, but we felt that there was no question that there had been a witch hunt.”

The first documentary, Dretzin said, started to turn public opinion against the prosecutors and eventually led them to drop the charges against some of the defendants and offer no-contest pleas to Betsy Kelly and another defendant, Scott Privott.

“The fact that we fought for them, and were right, and managed to get seven people out of jail was astonishing, intoxicating,” Bikel told Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, in 2005. “That’s when I realized what power I had in television.”

Howard Rosenberg, a television critic for The Los Angeles Times, wrote in 1997 that the Little Rascals trilogy was “one long, throbbing, agonizing ache, a remarkable body of work that records an odyssey of anguish straddling a hellish eight years.”

Bikel won five news and documentary Emmy Awards: one for the first “Innocence Lost” entry, and others for her works about El Salvador; Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearings, which included questioning on accusations of sexual harassment from Anita Hill; an armed robbery gone wrong; and the challenges that wrongly convicted inmates face as they reenter society after being exonerated through DNA evidence.

She also received an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for each of the three “Innocence Lost” documentaries, and in 2007, she won the John Chancellor Award, from Columbia Journalism School, for the breadth of her work on “Frontline.”

Ofra Yehiely Ichilov was born Sept. 12, 1929, in Tel Aviv during what was then known as the British Mandate of Palestine. Her father, Haim, was an electrical engineer, and her mother, Debora (Novic) Ichilov, was a special education teacher.

At 19, Ofra moved to France, where she attended the University of Paris and Sciences Po. She later immigrated to New York, where she married folk singer and actor Theodore Bikel in 1955 but divorced two years later. In 1956, she won $20,000 as a contestant on the television game show “The Big Surprise.”

She worked as a researcher for Time and Newsweek magazines, then landed an entry-level job in 1961 at ABC that involved cuing performers and sticking their marks on studio floors with masking tape. Later in the decade, she became a producer at National Educational Television, the predecessor to the Public Broadcasting Service. She made programs for a consumer watchdog series and segments for “The Great American Dream Machine,” a weekly satirical variety series that premiered in 1971.

After returning to Israel to produce documentaries, she came back to the United States, where she was hired in 1977 to work on “World,” the series that evolved into “Frontline.”

David Fanning, who was the executive producer of both series, recalled his first meeting with her.

“As we were talking, I realized that I had to see some of her films, and she reached into a bag full of 16-millimeter reels,” he said in a phone interview. “By the end of the screening, we had begun the conversation that we’d have for the next 25 or 30 years.”

She had “an intense curiosity,” he said, and “wanted more time, more money, more research, more travel, more shooting time” for her documentaries. She continued to receive funding for her work — an oeuvre of nearly 30 films — “because it’s great literary journalism,” he said. “She got people off.”

Three men — two incarcerated for rape and murder and one for rape — were released from prison after the airing of “The Case for Innocence” (2000), which explored why exculpatory DNA evidence had been ignored or discounted.

Barry C. Scheck, a founder of the Innocence Project, which works to overturn wrongful convictions and took up the case of one of the men featured in the documentary, described Bikel as “relentless” in an interview with the Times in 2005.

“Ofra doesn’t hesitate to call me at all hours of the evening,” Scheck said. “She calls me seven times and I’m trying a case, but if I haven’t immediately returned her call, she says: ‘What’s wrong? You don’t love me?’”

Bikel’s documentary “An Ordinary Crime” (2002) brought attention to the case of Terence Garner, who had served almost four years in prison after being convicted on several charges, including attempted first-degree murder and armed robbery at a finance company, in what turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. Soon after the documentary was broadcast, a judge set aside his conviction and released Garner on bond, pending a new trial. The prosecutor subsequently declined to refile the charges.

“The Plea” (2004) featured Charles Gampero Jr., who felt pressured by a judge to plead guilty to manslaughter and served nine years in prison before he was granted parole several months after the documentary aired. It also included the story of Patsy Kelly Jarrett, who refused to plead guilty in connection with a murder and a robbery and was paroled after being imprisoned for 28 years.

Bikel told the Times that she sent copies of the interviews she had conducted with Gampero and Jarrett to their parole boards. In Jarrett’s case, Bikel also sent a letter that said, “Look, I don’t know if she will talk for herself, and I would like to do this.”

Abbe Smith, Jarrett’s lawyer, told the Times in 2005: “It’s a little embarrassing. I’ve been a criminal defense lawyer for 22 years, and her work has probably led to the release of more prisoners than mine.”

Parents who were outraged by Bikel’s “Innocence Lost” films accused her of bias, which she denied.

“But if you say I have a point of view? Yes,” she told the Times in 1993. “I sympathize with the parents, but there is something called due process, a legal system, something called justice.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.