Juanita, a girl in a town that's populated by Hispanics, is raped and beaten. The only thing she says before falling into a deep coma is say that her attacker is an outsider, a Gringo. Local Mexican-American Sheriff Vega arrests all three outsiders there are. All he can do is intimidate the prisoners so that one of them admits to being the attacker, or that the girl wakes up to identify him. The girl dies, and her father prepares a lynch mob.
The sheriff can't get any help from the state, and even Mendoza, his deputy, is unwilling to help him. The sheriff takes the prisoners out of the jail in a trip to the closest city where they can be processed. But the prisoners, an unstable kid, a brutish man and a coldly intelligent youngster have other plans.
