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Synopsis: "The Conspirator" tells the story of
the conspiracy to assassinate President Lincoln, the military trial of
the lone female charged, and the reluctant lawyer assigned to defend her.
In the wake of Abraham Lincoln's assassination, seven men and one woman
are then arrested and charged with conspiring to kill the President, the
Vice-President, and the Secretary of State. The lone woman charged, Mary
Surratt, 42, owns a boarding house where John Wilkes Booth and others
met and planned the simultaneous attacks.
Against the ominous back-drop of post-Civil War Washington, newly-minted
lawyer, Frederick Aiken, a 28-year-old Union war-hero, reluctantly agrees
to defend Surratt before a military tribunal. As the trial unfolds, Aiken
realizes his client may be innocent and that she is being used as bait
and hostage in order to capture the only conspirator to have escaped a
massive manhunt, her own son.
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