[1] Three of the characters, Jake Brigance, Harry Rex Vonner, and Lucien Wilbanks, later appear in two sequel novels, 2013's Sycamore Row and 2020's A Time for Mercy.

Harry Rex Vonner also appears in the 2002 Grisham novel, The Summons, and in the short story "Fish Files", in the 2009 collection Ford County.

[8] In the small town of Clanton, in fictional Ford County, Mississippi, a ten-year-old African-American girl named Tonya Hailey is violently raped by two neo-Confederates, James "Pete" Willard and Billy Ray Cobb, shortly after stealing a Confederate Flag from a local college exhibition.

Carl Lee is determined to avenge Tonya, and while Pete and Billy Ray are being led into holding after their bond hearing, he kills both men with an M16 rifle.

Helping Jake are two loyal friends, disbarred attorney and mentor Lucien Wilbanks, and sleazy divorce lawyer Harry Rex Vonner.

Later, the team is assisted by liberal law student Ellen Roark, who has prior experience with death penalty cases and offers her services as a temporary clerk pro bono.

The team also receives some illicit behind-the-scenes help from black county sheriff Ozzie Walls, a figure beloved by the black community and also well respected by the white community who upholds the law by arresting Carl Lee but, as the father of two daughters of his own, privately supports Carl Lee and gives him special treatment while in jail and goes out of the way to assist Jake in any way he legally can.

Billy Ray's brother, Freddy, seeks revenge against Carl Lee, enlisting the help of the Mississippi branch of the Ku Klux Klan and its Grand Dragon, Stump Sisson.

Subsequently, the KKK attempts to plant a bomb beneath Jake's porch, leading him to send his wife and daughter out of town until the trial is over.

He badly discredits the state's psychiatrist by establishing that he has never conceded to the insanity of any defendant in any criminal case in which he has been asked to testify, even when several other doctors have been in consensus otherwise.

After a long and contentious deliberation, in which the jurors have to contend with one particularly racist member of the panel who openly insists on using the "N"-word routinely during the deliberations, a unanimous acquittal by reason of temporary insanity is finally achieved when one of the jurors asks the others to seriously imagine that Carl Lee and his daughter were white and that the murdered rapists were black, and polling the jury by secret ballot on the question of whether they would kill the rapists in such a case.