David Gale  is a prisoner on death row in Texas. With only a few days to his execution, his lawyer negotiates a half million-dollar fee to tell his story to Bitsey Bloom , a journalist from a major news magazine known for her ability to keep secrets and protect her sources. He tells her the story of how he ended up on death row, revealed to the movie audience through a series of lengthy flashbacks. Gale is head of the philosophy department at the University of Texas and an active member of DeathWatch, a group campaigning against capital punishment. He loses a televised debate with the Governor of Texas when he is unable to point to an example of a demonstrably innocent man being executed. Later, a graduation party, he encounters Berlin , an attractive female graduate student who had been expelled from the school, corners the inebriated Gale and succeeds in getting him to have rough sex with her. She then falsely accuses Gale of rape. Later, she drops the charges and flees, but the negative publicity costs Gale his career, marriage, and reputation. Constance Harraway , a fellow DeathWatch activist, is a close friend of Gale's who consoles him after his life fall apart. However, Harraway is found raped and murdered, suffocated by a plastic bag taped over her head. An autopsy reveals that she had been forced to swallow the key of the handcuffs used to restrain her, a psychological torture technique utilized under the communist regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu, which Gale and Harraway had both protested against. The physical evidence at the crime scene points to Gale, who is convicted of her rape and murder and is, ironically, sentenced to death. In the present, Bloom investigates the case in between her visits with Gale. She comes to believe that the apparent evidence against Gale does not add up. She is also tailed several times in her car by a figure who turns out to be Dusty Wright , the alleged one-time lover and colleague of Harraway's. Wright slips evidence to Bloom that suggests Gale has been framed, implying that the "real" murderer videotaped the crime. Bloom pursues this lead until she finds a tape revealing that Harraway, who was suffering from terminal leukemia, had committed an elaborate suicide to look like murder. She and Wright are both seen on the videotape, showing that they framed Gale as part of a plan to discredit the death penalty. Bloom does not find this evidence until the day of Gale's scheduled execution. In a frenzy, she tries to give the tape to the authorities in time to stop the execution. She arrives at the prison just as the warden announces that it has already been carried out. The tape is then released, causing a media and political uproar over the execution of an innocent man. Later, Wright receives the fee that Bloom's magazine agreed to pay for the interview, and delivers it to Gale's ex-wife in Spain, along with a postcard from Berlin apologizing for the false rape accusation. His ex-wife looks distraught, knowing Gale told the truth and that she effectively stole their child away from him. Much later still, a videotape labeled "Off the Record" is delivered to Bloom. This tape picks up at the point where Wright confirmed that Harraway was dead, then continues on to show him stepping aside to allow Gale, also present and party to the suicide, to caress her body. It was in doing this that Gale left his fingerprints on Harraway's plastic suffocation bag. The plot has some parallels with the 1999 Clint Eastwood drama True Crime, but with a different outcome.