In the last moments of his life, a criminal reviews the circumstances that led him to death row.

At the execution of John Allen, a convicted murderer, the warden speculates that during the two seconds after he is electrocuted, Allen will review his life: John is a riveter at a construction site during Prohibition, and lives with his best friend and co-worker Bud Clark. Bud is engaged to be married and tries to fix John up with a date. Uninterested, John goes to a dance hall, where he meets taxi dancer Shirley Day. He defends Shirley against an amorous patron, and her boss and lover, Tony, fires her as a result of his interference. Since John wants to be with an educated woman, Shirley feigns interest in attending a lecture with him, but instead persuades him to go to a nightclub and gets him drunk on "tea." Shirley then bribes a justice of the peace to marry them, and after returning to John's apartment, kicks Bud out. Three weeks later John and Bud discuss Shirley at work, and Bud tells John about all the lies Shirley has told him, suggesting that Shirley still spends her afternoons with Tony at the dance hall. John furiously lunges at Bud, who falls twenty stories to his death. Overcome by grief, John quits his job; however, living on Shirley's ill-gotten dance hall money demoralizes him. When Shirley tells him that she is helping Annie, Bud's innocent fiancée, to get a job at the dance hall, John becomes enraged. With money he wins at the racetracks, John pays Tony what he thinks he owes him, then shoots Shirley. At his trial, John refuses all defense, claiming that he should have been "burned" before, when he was at his lowest, not when he found personal justice. Finally, at the scene of the execution, the lever is pulled.