In 1998 in Jasper, Texas, James Byrd, Jr., a black man, was chained to a pickup truck and dragged to his death by three white men. The town was forever altered, and the nation woke up to the horror of a modern-day lynching. The filmmakers set out to document the aftermath of the murder by following the trials of the local men charged with the crime. The result is an explicit and troubling portrait of race in America, one that asks how and why a crime like this could have occurred.