Best movies like Shot in the Heart

Socialite Molly Lasch is released from prison after serving a six-year sentence for the murder of her husband, Dr. Gary Lasch. Now, with the help of Fran, an investigative reporter, Molly sets out to prove her innocence. Together they uncover a conspiracy of silence at the Lasch Medical Center and a shocking secret that could cost both women their lives.

Prompted by a just-published book that holds ex-lieutenant Ben Tyson accountable for a hushed-up massacre committed by his platoon in a Hue hospital 18 years before, the army recalls Tyson to stand trial for murder. Tyson, confronted by an army authority anxious to save its own face, an embarrassed federal government, and a threatened marriage, and entangled, furthermore, in his own past lives and present sense of guilt, must call on all his cleverness and his own inner toughness to fight his case.

When reporter Rachel Armstrong writes a story that reveals the identity of a covert CIA operative, the government demands that Rachel reveal her source. She defies the special prosecutor and is thrown in jail. Meanwhile, her attorney, Albert Burnside argues her case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Liberal district attorney decides to seek the death penalty for a man who slaughtered a family at Christmastime, then drank their blood. He escapes, though, and starts killing again.

Randy commits a crime that would normally get him probation and a hefty fine, but in the "three-strikes" world of justice, he finds himself locked up for 25 years. His cellmate Jake is a congenial yet remorseless lifer who casually informs Randy that he slit his wife's throat because she slept with another man just three months after they exchanged vows. Jake recognizes Randy's fear and offers him advice on how to make it in prison. But it soon becomes clear that Jake has much more than mentoring in mind as he takes Randy under his wing. "Jailbait" sets a darkly cerebral tone, juxtaposing brutality with the unattainable ideal of intimacy in the harshest of psychological environments. For these two men so yearning to be anything but who they are and where they are, power is the goal, and it's never clear who truly holds it right up to the last unsettling moment

Based on the true story of teenager James Burns who goes from a suburban street gang to a maximum-security prison cell surrounded by hardened criminals. He turns his life around in prison thanks to the unexpected friendship he forms with a convicted murderer who becomes his mentor.

Australia, 1958. When a nine year old white girl is found murdered, police are quick to arrest illiterate Aborigine, Max Stuart. Under interrogation Max admits to the killing. With a legal system compromised by intimidation tactics, the skills of his two gifted but naïve defense lawyers are put to the test.

Idealistic young attorney Adam Hall takes on the death row clemency case of his racist grandfather, Sam Cayhall, a former Ku Klux Klan member he has never met.

After the apparent suicide of her daughter, a woman tries to prove that her son-in-law killed her.

A supernatural tale set on death row in a Southern prison, where gentle giant John Coffey possesses the mysterious power to heal people's ailments. When the cell block's head guard, Paul Edgecomb, recognizes Coffey's miraculous gift, he tries desperately to help stave off the condemned man's execution.

A death row inmate turns for spiritual guidance to a local nun in the days leading up to his scheduled execution for the murders of a young couple.

When Colin Warner was wrongfully convicted of murder, his best friend Carl King devoted his life to proving his innocence.

After a botched robbery results in the brutal murder of a rural family, two drifters elude police, in the end coming to terms with their own mortality and the repercussions of their vile atrocity.

In this fact-based made-for TV film, Gary Gilmore, an Indiana man who just finished serving a lengthy stay in prison, tries to start anew by moving to Utah. Before long, Gary begins an ill-advised romance with the troubled Nicole Baker, a teenage single mother. As their relationship quickly deteriorates, Gary goes on a murderous rampage, leaving two dead. During his trial, he demands capital punishment; a media circus ensues and outsiders look to profit from his story.

Adapted from a story by Truman Capote ("In Cold Blood"), the world of the prison convict is open to the viewer. As the story develops, one thing becomes clear. As in the outside world, there is a "system"; and just as on the outside, there is accommodation, honesty, cynicism, violence and all the other factors that make up our society. The film follows the three newcomers, it records the grim, terrifying, sometimes fascinating events that occur.

The investigation of two horrific mass murders leads to the capture and trial of the psychotic pseudo-hippie Charles Manson and his "family".

A South African political prisoner is tortured to obtain information on apartheid conspirators. Ten years later, the head officer in charge of the questioning is similarly held as prisoner and questioned about his past offenses.

Upon taking a new job, young lawyer Rick Hayes is assigned to the clemency case of Cindy Liggett, a woman convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to death. As Hayes investigates the background for her case, the two begin to form a deep friendship, while all the while the date for her execution draws nearer.

In 1950s England, slow-witted Derek Bentley falls in with a group of petty criminals led by Chris Craig, a teenager with a fondness for American gangster films. Chris and Derek's friendship leads to their involvement in the true case which would forever shake England's belief in capital punishment.

Successful New York attorney Sam Leibowitz travels to the South in 1933 to defend nine young black men accused of raping two women on an Alabama freight train.

In the 1940s South, an African-American man is wrongly accused of the killing a a white store owner. In his defense, his white attorney equates him with a lowly hog, to indicate that he didn't have the sense to know what he was doing. Nevertheless convicted, he is sentenced to die, but his godmother and the aunt of the local schoolteacher convince school teacher go to the convicted man's cell each day to try to reaffirm to him that he is not an animal but a man with dignity.

After a long time in the army, an Afro-American soldier returns to his hometown, where, years ago, his brother was executed for the rape and murder of two white girls. The commando believes his brother to have been innocent and seeks a proof for that, but there are some people in the town who will stop at nothing to hide the secrets of their past...

Boozer, skirt chaser, careless father. You could create your own list of reporter Steve Everett's faults but there's no time. A San Quentin Death Row prisoner is slated to die at midnight – a man Everett has suddenly realized is innocent.

An abused 15 year old is charged with a murder that carries the death penalty in this fact-based story.

Four American soldiers stationed near a German village face death in the rape of a local girl and are defended by outside counsel Major Steve Grant.

While fighting for a woman who sits on death row, a lawyer happens upon new information which brings into question the motives of a man associated with her client

The movie tells the story of a woman who struggles and fights to escape the gas chamber being condemned with capital punishment because of her participation in a hold up in which a person was killed.

There is no question that the Arab terrorist portrayed by Robert Davi is guilty of killing five US citizens in Barcelona. Even his lawyers have zero respect for the rabidly sociopathic Davi. But Jewish defence attorney Ron Leibman is obsessed with the concept of Due Process, and has vowed that Davi will receive a scrupulously fair trial when the terrorist is extradited to America. The defence mounted by Leibman confounds and aggravates government prosecutor Sam Waterston--but he, like Leibman, remains a man of judiciary integrity.

Barefoot Bobby Briggs, the legendary running back for the Austin Steers was today sentenced to die for his role in the armed robbery/murder at a downtown Stop 'n Go convenience store... It's five years later, and Bobby's appeals have all but run out, and the Austin Steers are - once again - on the march to the Superbowl, with a lock on the playoffs, when their wide receiver has a season ending injury. With their playoff hopes in shambles, the Governor of Texas controversially offers Bobby a furlough -- from death row -- to help rescue the Steers' post-season hopes, and even play in the Superbowl.

The story of Martha Moxley, a 15-year-old girl murdered in Greenwich in the 1970s. Her murder went unsolved for 25 years.

A lawyer defends a man he's known since serving together in Vietnam, who has been accused of murdering three Vietnamese immigrants. Now he'll have to fight against a tenacious District Attorney, and evidence connected to the man's wife.

The McMartin family's lives are turned upside down when they are accused of serious child molestation. The family run a school for infants. An unqualified child cruelty "expert" videotapes the children describing outrageous stories of abuse. One of the most expensive and long running trials in US legal history, exposes the lack of evidence and unprofessional attitudes of the finger pointers which kept one of the accused in jail for over 5 years without bail.

A man is executed in the electric chair for having killed several women, but due to lightning striking a transformer at the moment of execution, he survives. As soon as he's well, however, they plan to electrocute him again, but now he has become a changed man and the female criminal psychiatrist attributes it to the electrocution wiping out certain brain cells.

A young man is accused of rape and murder and placed on trial. His father doesn't believe that he is guilty, so in act of desperation he grabs the bailiff's guns and takes the whole jury hostage and insists that the prosecuting attorney re-investigates the crime that his son's accused of.

A corporate lawyer's interest in a decade-old murder case is piqued by a new confession that could clear the convicted killer, who sits on death row.