One March morning, apparently without emotion, Tommaso Scalia carries out three murders. In the fascist city of Palermo in 1937, the law permits only one verdict - the death sentence. Yet the judge attempts to save the accused from this fate. He wages a lone battle, gaining no support either from the accused, from his own family or
from the court. Only one of the jurors, a simple peasant, takes his side and manages to persuade his colleagues to waive the death sentence. When the judge visits the peasant at home, he finds a man of considerable education who has acquired a great deal of knowledge from a library he inherited. But the laws of the time are more powerful: the judge is dismissed and the judgement is quashed...