Cher stars in this chilling courtroom thriller as Kathleen Riley, an exhausted Washington, D.C., public defender who is saddled with an impossible case: clearing accused murderer Carl Wayne Anderson (Liam Neeson), a deaf-mute vagrant Vietnam vet. A young clerk typist (Katie O'Hare) has been found dead, a Supreme Court Justice has taken his own life, and Anderson was found just footsteps away from the young woman's body. All the odds seem to be against Kathleen until one of the jurors, Eddie Sanger (Dennis Quaid), a seductive, if rather slippery, Washington lobbyist, decides to help her by searching for clues himself. Determined to prove the innocence of her wrongfully accused client, Kathleen accepts Eddie's help, forming a top-secret and very illegal partnership. In between bouts of snappy verbal sparring, the unlikely team uncovers a sinister conspiracy that puts both their lives in danger and reveals a highly unlikely suspect at the bottom of an extremely well hidden Washington scandal. Dennis Quaid and Cher are a seductive and witty team in director Peter Yates's entertaining murder mystery that combines cutthroat action with a stylish and imaginative puzzle of clues.