When an ambitious but icy psychiatrist examines a confessed child killer for a headline-grabbing trial, the psychiatrist approaches the job as a coolly academic exercise until their relationship tests his career and his soul.

SYNOPSIS:

Days before Christmas of 1934, Dr. Fredrick Wertham is approached at New York's Bellevue Hospital, where he serves as a senior psychiatrist, by the assistant district attorney of neighboring Westchester County. A prolific writer, Wertham has a reputation as a leading psychiatrist in the study of crime. The DA, Gallagher, is building his case in the high-profile case of Albert Fish, a child killer who was finally arrested six years after murdering 10-year-old Grace Budd. Fish repeatedly confessed to police, but Gallagher predicts that his defense will try to spare him the death penalty by pleading insanity. Gallagher wants Wertham to testify that Fish is sane. Wertham is lured by the promise of publicity. And, he sees Fish as a subject for a paper in a prestigious academic journal, a common method for doctors to raise their profiles.

A self-professed "fact-finder," Wertham visits Fish's adult daughter Gertrude; he treats her with such chilly condescension that she almost closes up. Before Gertrude tosses him out, Wertham manages to elicit from her one disturbing detail about her father: his habit of sticking needles inside his groin.

Wertham quickly realizes that medical literature has seen nothing like Fish. He abandons the prosecution and becomes allied with Fish's defense attorney, Dempsey. To establish Fish’s insanity, Wertham must make himself vulnerable so that Fish trusts him with the true horror of his criminal history.

Wertham develops an unsettling bond with Fish, who reveals grisly details of how he killed Grace Budd that were never publicly divulged. Fish also tells Wertham that Grace was not his only victim, that his compulsions drove him to abuse and murder countless children for years. Wertham leaves that interview and gets sick on the street. It’s the lowest point in his character arc, and it shows how far he’s come from treating Fish as a topic for a paper.

At trial, Wertham is pitted against the boss he loathes at Bellevue, Dr. Gregory, who emerges as a star witness for the prosecution. Dr. Gregory himself had signed Fish's discharge papers, declaring him sane when he was sent for observation for an unrelated crime years before. In his testimony, Wertham argues that Bellevue's negligence in its superficial examination of Fish cost lives.

The jury finds Fish sane. The automatic sentence is death. Wertham carries his crusade to keep Fish alive in an appeal to the governor of New York. “To execute a sick man is like burning witches,” he contends.

Ultimately, Fish dies in the electric chair. Wertham loses...

... and yet...

Dr. Gregory is fired. Wertham takes his place as director.

He has a promotion, a new executive office – and empathy. This is evident when Gertrude, Fish’s daughter, visits him a few years after the trial. Dirt poor, jobless, and a single mother, she asks Wertham if he can find her work. He agrees. Of her father, Wertham tells Gertrude: “Your father had an illness. The illness itself was no disgrace. But how it was handled was.”