Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, Matthew McConaughey, and Kevin Spacey star, with Donald and Kiefer Sutherland appearing in supporting roles and Octavia Spencer in her film debut.

In Canton, Mississippi, ten-year-old African American girl Tonya Hailey is abducted, raped, and beaten by two local white men, Billy Ray Cobb and Pete Willard, while on her way home from getting groceries.

Carl Lee goes to the county courthouse and opens fire with an automatic rifle, killing both rapists and unintentionally wounding Deputy Dwayne Looney, whose leg is later amputated.

As the rape and subsequent revenge killing gain national media attention, district attorney Rufus Buckley decides to take the case in hopes of furthering his political career.

He seeks the death penalty, and presiding Judge Omar Noose denies Jake a change of venue to a more ethnically diverse county, meaning that Carl Lee will face an all-white jury.

Brigance seeks help from his defense team: law student Ellen Roark, close friend Harry Rex Vonner, and former mentor and longtime activist Lucien Wilbanks, a once-great civil rights lawyer.

On the first day of the trial, the Klan takes to the streets and rallies, only to be outnumbered by counter-protesters consisting of the area's minority residents and whites who support Carl Lee's acquittal.

[4] Other location filming took place in the Jackson, Mississippi metro area, including the Jackson-Evers International Airport and Hinds County Medical Center (now Merit Health Central).

"[14] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone felt that "they [Schumacher and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman] cram[med] in too much," adding, "This distracts from the heart of the picture, which is in the bond between Carl Lee (the brilliant [Samuel L.] Jackson is quietly devastating) and Jake, a husband and father who knows he, too, would have shot anyone who raped his little girl.

[20] Peron Didier of Libération criticized the script, calling it "extremely dirty": the movie, says the newspaper, "only militates in favour of the Black cause to legitimize, after many plot twists (the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan, courtroom trickery, all kinds of threats) the "insane" gesture of the avenging father".

[21] Jean Francois Rauger of Le Monde wrote that "the film mixes the 'politically correct' alibi of anti-racism with the justification of personal justice since the accused is black and the action takes place in a city in the South of the United States.

To this moralizing ideological bombast is added an emphatic staging, for a story full of useless digressions, a characterization of the characters so crude that it borders on stupidity.