Read The Times review of Judgment at Nuremberg

Abby Mann won an Oscar for the screenplay of Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), a dramatisation of the Nazi war-crime trials, starring Richard Widmark (obituary, March 27), and he sustained an interest in stories of justice and injustice throughout a career in film and television spanning more than 50 years.

His Emmy-winning television movie The Marcus-Nelson Murders (1973) was a socially committed crime drama about a detective who suspects a black youth is being framed. It was based on a real case, but significantly Mann introduced a fictional character who would go on to his own series and become one of the most familiar television detectives of the 1970s — the bald-headed, lollipop-sucking lieutenant Theo Kojak.

“A writer worth his salt at all has an obligation not only to entertain but to comment on the world in which he lives,” Mann said after winning his Academy award. He also won three Emmy awards and was nominated for many more.

Abby Mann was born Abraham Goodman in Philadelphia, the son of an immigrant jeweller from Eastern Europe, in 1927 (though Writers Guild of America records show it as 1924). He grew up in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, attended university in Philadelphia and New York and served in the US Army during the Second World War. He began his scriptwriting career during the infancy of television drama in the early 1950s, working on productions that went out under banners such as Lux Video Theatre and Goodyear Television Playhouse.

Judgment at Nuremberg was a fictionalised account of the trial of German judges, looking at the complicity of individuals in criminal acts by a state. It was originally written for television and broadcast in the Playhouse 90 series in 1959, with a cast that included Maximilian Schell, Claude Rains and Melvyn Douglas, with George Roy Hill as director. The American Gas Association was one of the show’s sponsors and prohibited the use of the phrase “gas chamber” on air.

Schell reprised his role as defence attorney in the film, which was directed by Stanley Kramer and featured a much starrier cast including Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland. It was nominated for 11 Oscars, with Mann winning Best Adapted Screenplay and Schell Best Actor.

Mann worked with Lancaster and Garland again on A Child is Waiting (1963), a drama set in a special needs school, directed by John Cassavetes and produced by Stanley Kramer. He also scripted Kramer’s Ship of Fools (1965), a rather overblown adaptation of a Katherine Anne Porter novel about a ship carrying Jews and other refugees from Mexico to Germany in the early 1930s. It was Vivien Leigh’s final film and brought Mann another Oscar nomination.

Mann also used a novel as his starting point for the screenplay for The Detective (1968), which starred Frank Sinatra as a detective investigating the murder of a homosexual and uncovering corruption along the way. Years later Mann worked on the TV biopic Sinatra (1992).

The Marcus-Nelson Murders was based on the 1963 Wylie-Hoffert “Career Girl” murders, in which two young New Yorkers were raped and murdered. Brooklyn police obtained a confession from an African-American suspect using dubious means, while a completely separate team of detectives in Manhattan identified the real killer, clearing the first man in the process. The original suspect was still in prison when Mann began work on his film and he visited him and interviewed him there.

Mann used the format of the police procedural to investigate police procedure itself, along with institutionalised corruption and racism. He won the first of his Emmy awards for the film. Its central character got his own series and made Telly Savalas a major star. Kojak ran for five years and more than 100 episodes, with Mann credited as creator, and was revived in 2005.

There were suggestions that Mann was not entirely happy with the direction that the television series took. Social justice remained an overriding concern in his dramas and he won further Emmy awards for Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story (1989) and Indictment: The McMartin Trial (1995). This final Emmy was as a producer and he shared it with Oliver Stone, among others. His last TV movie was Whitewash: The Clarence Brandley Story (2002), the true story of a black caretaker wrongly convicted of rape and murder.

Mann is survived by his wife, Myra, and their three children.

Abby Mann, film and television scriptwriter, was born on December 1, 1927. He died on March 25, 2008, aged 80