A young couple in Modesto, California were brutally attacked in their home leaving Matt Skokie, a war vet, murdered, and his wife, Gwen, unconscious, barely hanging on. The crime sends shock waves throughout the community stirring up tensions across socioeconomic and racial lines - from the points of view of all those involved.

The second season of American Crime is set in the U.S. Midwest -- representative of the canvas that is America -- at two high schools, one public and one private. Issues of sexual orientation and socioeconomic disparity come to a boil when lurid photos of a high school boy, Taylor Blaine, are posted on social media following a school party. Circumstances become more complicated when Taylor accuses two players on an elite private high school’s championship basketball team, Kevin LaCroix and Eric Tanner, of drugging, assaulting and then posting the pictures of him online.

When a father, Luis Salazar, travels illegally from Mexico into the United States to search for his missing son, he discovers that modern servitude is thriving in the farmlands and agricultural communities. Promised a job and a place to live, these laborers find themselves forced to live in abject poverty. Required to pay for their own food and other essentials, what little money they make is paid back to their employers, and because they will forever be in debt, they can never leave.