Michael Zinn lived the "American Dream". After having built a successful company, Zinn found himself thrown into a nightmare world of criminal prosecution. Business adversaries had orchestrated a campaign of malicious and false complaints to the FBI, where Zinn's activities were given a sinister twist. In response, the government launched a brutal investigation, a veritable "fishing expedition" looking for crimes. The government managed to turn minor technical errors relating to campaign finance laws into a trumped up five-count felony indictment charging "Conspiracy" to defraud the Government of the United States.

The federal prosecutor waged a continuous smear campaign in the local press. So, after 18 months of investigation, with terrible emotional pain to his family, Zinn reluctantly agreed to plead guilty to a negotiated "crime". There was one proviso that the government lawyers demanded. He was not to make any statements to the judge contrary to the government's version of "the truth". He was sentenced to serve six months in prison.

On the day he surrendered to a minimum-security work camp, Zinn was served a writ to appear before a grand jury. Immediately, he was shipped under appalling conditions from jail to jail, dragged around the country in leg-irons and handcuffs. For his family and his lawyers, he had simply disappeared.

Michael Zinn discovered that his nightmare was all too common. Many of the two million people in the prison system, and the six million more under "supervision" are not "criminals" as we think the term. They are trapped by a system that increasingly views those who insist on due process as "the enemy," and robs the innocent and inexperienced of the right to trial by jury

Michael Zinn managed to pick up the pieces of his life, return to his AMEX company and continue his entrepreneurial success. He wrote an acclaimed book entitled "Mad Dog Prosecutors and Other Hazards of American Business", determined to offer hope and support to the hundreds of thousands of people who find themselves facing the same predicament.
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Our film is based on the events of that book.

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