If you’re not familiar with the case of First Lt. Clint Lorance, currently serving a 19-year sentence at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., for murder, then you’re probably not a regular Fox News viewer. Court-martialed and jailed in 2013 for the deaths of two unarmed Afghans killed by men under his command, Lorance was later adopted by Sean Hannity and other conservative commentators as a victim of Obama-era political correctness run amok.

That’s just one of the reasons that the Lorance case is not a typical true-crime tale. The five-part Starz mini-series “Leavenworth,” on the other hand, adheres closely to the familiar true-crime television template, and it’s not a great match for the material. There’s a compelling story to be told about Lorance and his fate, but its disparate elements and unusual emotional and political fault lines would test the most skilled documentarian, or feature filmmaker for that matter. The pieces are there in “Leavenworth” (premiering Sunday), but the viewer is left to do the work of sifting and weighing them and deciding where the real story lies.

The shooting at the heart of the case took place in a matter of seconds in front of numerous witnesses, and its physical details are for the most part not in dispute. In July 2012 , Lorance, in just his third day as a platoon leader in the Army’s 73rd Cavalry Regiment , ordered his troops to fire on three Afghan men who approached the platoon on a motorcycle. The Afghans were unarmed, but it’s possible that Lorance believed, falsely, that the Army’s rules of engagement had changed to allow firing on anyone riding a motorcycle.

Questions were raised immediately about his decision, and a year later, nine members of the platoon testified against him. There are elements of he said-they said about the case — Lorance’s men maintained that the motorcycle was 200 yards away and posed no threat, a claim that’s supported by an animated recreation in the series.