Ben Reed is a young, newly elected, and popular judge. His world is perfect until the murder of two parish detectives and the robbery of 50 million dollars of high-grade heroin the detectives had been transporting. Wally Edwards is arrested with little to no evidence for the murders and robbery. Roy Mitchum, the high-profile defense attorney usually associated with the defense of Mafia types, comes to the defense of Edwards. The case is randomly assigned to Reed, who is unwittingly snared in a spider's web of deception, and the spider's fang is a woman that leads to Reed being suspected of the murders.