Webster Smith, battered but unbowed.
Denzel Washington? Or Tyrese Gibson? Who would you cast in the lead role?
So here's how David Collins sees the Webster Smith story, as it seems to be shaping up for the inevitable major motion picture.

Webster's the handsome, smart, young Black cadet at the Coast Guard Academy, son of an academy graduate, excellent student, star of the football team.

He's also a ladies' man, and in time he's dating one of the ranking female students of the cadet corps, also smart, beautiful, a darling of the academy brass. She's white.

She gets pregnant, has an abortion, and, eventually, news of the unfortunate development in their affair works its way up the ranks. Leaders in the cadet corps are not supposed to get pregnant.

It doesn't take long for an academy investigation to come down hard on Smith, bringing a wide assortment of charges, including rape. He's taken out of the cadet population, made to do hard labor while not in class and ordered not to have any contact with his fellow students. Presumed innocent?

Smith is eventually brought to court-martial, a public spectacle, the first of its kind in the school's 130-year history. No other cadet has ever faced this kind of response to a sexual-assault complaint. And there are lots of them every year, by the Coast Guard's own accounting.

Of the numerous charges finally whittled down to 10 for his trial, Smith is found guilty of four of the original. The others melt away with the preposterousness of much of the testimony: a witness, his girlfriend at the time, so intoxicated she couldn't remember what happened in an encounter with Smith; another who was kissed at a party but continued a friendly, budding relationship with him.

In a fade-away scene from the trial, a tearful Smith, in dress uniform, his wrists cinched in tight cuffs behind his back, is led past his accusers and paraded before a pack of press photographers.

As the story turns, though, the convictions come under attack in an appeal brought by one of the country's most prestigious law firms, which appears to have taken up the case as a pro bono civil rights cause.

It turns out the only sexual assault charges against Smith that stuck came from a woman who had lied in the past about the consensual nature of another sexual encounter with a service person. But the judge at Smith's court-martial did not let the jury hear testimony about the witness's previous lie about being sexually assaulted.

It doesn't take a Hollywood story line or smart Washington lawyers to conclude that Webster Smith was railroaded, a 21st-century lynching.

The Coast Guard surely knows this.

Rear Adm. James C. Van Sice was transferred from his post as superintendent of the academy soon after the Smith trial and allowed to retire early. An internal Coast Guard investigation later revealed that Van Sice had made “questionable” comments to one of Smith's accusers, prior to the court martial, suggesting the detrimental effect the trial was going to have on his own career.

A task force formed by the Coast Guard in the wake of the trial concluded that the academy has lost its mission, that there is a strong link at the school between sexual assault and alcohol abuse, and that minority cadets feel marginalized and mistrusting of the administration.

Sadly, this post-mortem reckoning and disciplining of academy leaders has not yet helped clear Webster Smith's name.

Just this week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security dismissed a racial discrimination suit brought by Smith on what amounted to a technicality. The department, which oversees the Coast Guard, said he couldn't challenge the findings of the military court martial through the civilian complaint forum.

Actually, the racial discrimination complaint was not directed at the outcome of the court-martial, but at the fact that he was court-martialed at all, unlike all the white cadets before him accused of sexual assault.

An academy spokesman, Chief Warrant Officer David M. French, made matters worse by saying that the Homeland Security decision “validates” the school's actions in the Webster Smith case. In fact, it does no such thing.

By the time the final movie script is finished, though, maybe the academy stonewalling will have stopped and Smith, as the music swells, will finally step up, in full dress uniform, to receive his academy degree, a commission, and maybe even an apology.