Overview
Frightened, my wife nudges me awake, certain that she heard a noise somewhere in the house. I hear the intruder a moment later. Our home is in a run-down part of town where burglaries and robbery have become commonplace. Worried about our eighteen-month-old in an adjoining room, I get up, grabbing a golf club I know to be in our closet, and go out to investigate. There's just sufficient light to illuminate the form of a man close to me in the hall. He turns and thrusts something at me that I can't see well that I learn later was a knife. My club strikes the man in the temple and kills him. I have two years of my prison sentence yet to serve. Is this justice?
Criminal attorney Forrest Spencer would argue no. Lucy Jackson knows with certainty that her husband is about to sexually assault their willing preadolescent daughter. Lucy has been induced by her manipulative spouse to believe that she is powerless to interfere. She will lose all—her children, her marriage, her home—if she tries in any way to intercede. Convinced she has no choice, prepared to sacrifice all for her child, she kills her husband. Spencer must find a way to convince a jury that there are times when homicide within the home may be justified.