"When two wealthy white landowners are found dead, the whole country immediately thinks it must be Jerome Washington, the hired help, who killed them. He was standing over the bodies when the police responded to an anonymous call and the only one on the property at the time of death. As far as the state is concerned, it's an open and shut case. Jack Lee, born and raised in Freeman County, knows that every man deserves a solid defense and agrees to...

A small-town lawyer with a big-time reputation, Stafford Lee Penney, Mississippi's #1 lawyer who has never lost a case, when his wife is scandalously killed, spirals into a legal and personal legal streak, ruining his career, and making him the nation's #1 suspect.

Follows the story of eleven black men who were bailed out of jail, forced into slavery on a Georgia farm in 1921, and eventually murdered, and the trials of the white plantation owner and the black overseer, based on the FBI's notes.