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In the early '90s, someone broke into a suburban Washington, D.C., home and shot and killed a woman and a nurse at close range, and then disconnected the woman's handicapped son's breathing tube. The grim tragedy became headlines when the divorced father, music industry insider Lawrence Horn (James McDaniel), now living in Hollywood, was accused of hiring a Detroit hit man James Perry (Clark Johnson) to do the job. First Amendment/free speech scholar Rod Smolla (Timothy Hutton) is brought into the case not to help convict Horn and Perry, but to find the publisher of the book Hit Man, which was used as a blueprint for the crimes, guilty of aiding and abetting. No publisher had ever been convicted of a similar crime.