Jean-Xavier de Lestrade

Lestrade was born in Mirande, Gers, in southwestern France. He studied law and journalism in Paris. He has drawn from these to inform making film documentaries that scrutinize the mechanisms of society, particularly justice systems.

After college, Lestrade started working in journalism.

In 1992 Lestrade started making documentaries. He won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for his ninth film, Murder on a Sunday Morning (2001). It was about the Brenton Butler case in Jacksonville, Florida. A 15-year-old African-American youth was wrongfully arrested and tried for murder of a woman tourist. He was acquitted.

Several months later, another suspect was investigated and prosecuted by law enforcement. A jury convicted him for murder of Mary Stephens. Evidence included his fingerprint on her handbag, which had been recovered.

Lestrade is also known for his limited series The Staircase (2004), about the murder trial of author Michael Peterson of Durham, North Carolina. He was charged with killing his wife Kathleen. He produced two followups to the original series, chronicling Peterson's appeals and retrial, one in 2012 and one in 2018.

Lestrade is an executive producer for the TV series Sin City Law (2007), which has been shown on the Sundance Channel in the US.

His dramatic miniseries Laetitia (2020), based on the murder case of Laetitia Perrais of Nantes, France, was first aired on French TV in 2020. It aired on HBO and HBO Max in late August 2021.

While most of his documentaries were in English, in 2023, he directed the six-part true crime series Sambre - Anatomy of a Crime, which was produced in French.