When two white supremacists Pete Willard (
Doug Hutchison) and Billy Ray Cobb (
Nicky Katt) brutally rape Tonya Hailey (
RaéVen Kelly), a 10-year-old black girl in rural Canton, Mississippi, her distraught father Carl Lee (
Samuel L. Jackson), figuring the boys will simply be set free due to the deep-seated racism in the Mississippi Delta area, takes justice into his own hands, shoots Willard and Cobb, and hires Jake Brigance (
Matthew McConaughey), a young white lawyer, to defend him against the charge of murder. Aided by his former law professor Lucien Wilbanks (
Donald Sutherland), fellow attorney Harry Rex Vonner (
Oliver Platt), and law student Ellen Roark (
Sandra Bullock) from the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) at Oxford, MS, Brigance is hindered by tough D.A. Rufus Buckley (
Kevin Spacey) and a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.