We've all wanted to take the law into our own hands at some point; most of us are constrained by consequence - if not morality. After the rape and brutal treatment of a nine year-old black girl, (Tanya) at the hands of two despicable rednecks, Carl Lee (Samuel L. Jackson), the girl's vengeful father, takes the law into his own hands. This is a simple story of revenge - except that this is the South, the town of Canton is torn along racial lines. The murdered men are white, and the girl and her father are black. Thus begins a tale that might have been an examination of vigilantism, and might have been a story about the possibility of equal justice under the law. .
For all the wrong reasons Jake Brigance (Matthew McConaughey) takes Carl Lee's case even though it quickly appears to be unwinnable. For one thing the young, buffed, inexperienced lawyer is up against Rufus Buckley (Kevin Spacey) a ruthless and seasoned prosecutor. For another there is the resurgence of white indignation in town, and the sentiments are running high in Canton, Mississippi. So high that Freddie Cobb (Kiefer Sutherland), brother of one of the murdered men, summons the Klan (though when he says, "we need some Klan down here" you can almost hear the script conference).
When Brigance's family is threatened (his wife is Ashley Judd), he sends them away, determined to face the crisis alone. But Jake is not alone. Jake's ragtag support crew includes a rascally divorce lawyer (Oliver Platt), Jake's drunken mentor (Donald Sutherland), and a smart and eager law student, Ellen Roark (Sandra Bullock). The case becomes a firestorm, and everybody wants a piece of it -- from self-serving NAACP activists to cross-burning Klansmen. The KKK soon becomes the movie's chief "baddies." The Klan starts planting bombs, threatening Jake's family, beating up Jake's secretary (Brenda Fricker) and even kidnapping Roark.
