In 1987, Leo Schofield was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife, Michelle. Always insistent on his innocence, he was poorly served by his legal defense: the investigation was sloppy, the case was flimsy, and numerous pieces of evidence were ignored. He was sentenced to life in prison. Over 30 years later, Gilbert King is tipped off to Leo’s case and is astonished by what he finds: layers of corruption, flawed evidence and deep-seated errors. He can’t shake the story and starts to get to know Leo and his family. Leo shows an incomprehensible amount of grace and love about his situation, which spurs Gilbert even more to tell his story.

In December 1957, the wife of a Florida citrus baron is raped in her home while her husband is away. She claims a "husky Negro" did it, and the sheriff, the infamous racist Willis McCall, does not hesitate to round up a herd of suspects. But within days, McCall turns his sights on Jesse Daniels, a gentle, mentally impaired white 19-year-old. Soon Jesse is railroaded up to the state hospital for the insane, and locked away without trial. But crusading journalist Mabel Norris Reese cannot stop fretting over the case and its baffling outcome. She pursues the story for years, chasing down leads, hitting dead ends, winning unlikely allies. Bit by bit, the unspeakable truths behind a conspiracy that shocked a community into silence begin to surface.

Gilbert King shines new light on remarkable civil rights crusader Thurgood Marshall, setting his rich and driving narrative against the heroic backdrop of a case that U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson decried as “one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice.”