Successful New York attorney Sam Leibowitz travels to the South in 1933 to defend nine young black men accused of raping two women on an Alabama freight train. In the spring of 1931 nine black hoboes were pulled off an Alabama freight train and arrested for allegedly raping two young white women in a gondola car. Ranging in ages from twelve to twenty years, they were quickly tried and sentenced to the electric chair. News of their convictions spread and the plight of the Scottsboro Boys became a 'cause celebre' that fueled the fire of socialism worldwide, forcing an appeal to the United States Supreme Court and resulting in new trials for all nine defendants. New Yorker Samuel Leibowitz, a savvy and self-assured defense lawyer with an impressive string of courtroom victories, agreed to represent the accused at their retrials in Decatur, Alabama. His journey into the Deep South...

Helios World Inc. aims to solve the world's energy crisis by gathering and transmitting energy from solar flares. Despite warnings of a design flaw from the developing scientist, company head Jonathan Kane pushes the project forward and unknowingly unleashes a free-ranging and self-perpetuating magnetic vortex. Only Michael Edwards, a leading scientist on the company team, thinks something might be amiss when a sizable portion of their harvested energy simply disappears. The general area thereafter discovers itself endangered by a roving and unprecedented problem growing rapidly in strength - unique, unpredictable and potentially unstoppable. As if this isn't bad enough, the Paris branch of Helios World is set to run the same flawed program and thereby birth a second voracious monster in Europe.