The film is based on the 1926 Broadway play The Noose by Willard Mack and H.H. Van Sloan. The story is a melodrama about a young man, Nickie Elkins (Tom Brown), who is sentenced to hang for murdering a racketeer, Buck Gordon (Robert Gleckler), whom he discovers is his biological father. To protect his mother's reputation and her new life as the governor's wife, Nickie refuses to offer a defense or explanation for the killing during his trial. This puts the governor in the difficult position of having to decide whether to commute the sentence, despite widespread public sympathy.