The film chronicles the life of Lena Baker, born to a sharecropper family, who later worked as a maid in a small county town to support her three children. Convicted in 1945 of capital murder by an all-white, male jury, Baker was the only woman in Georgia to be executed by the electric chair. Baker acted in self-defense in the fatal shooting of her employer, Ernest Knight, during a struggle. He was an abusive drunk who had forced the 44-year-old woman into a sexual relationship and sometimes hel