Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead (2009)

• 57%
• 2009

Robert Blecker is one of the country's most impassioned crusaders for capital punishment. A self-described "emotive retributivist," Blecker teaches at the New York Law School in lower Manhattan. From there he conducts his one-man crusade to save capital punishment from the mounting wave of moratoriums and death-row commutations. Blecker teaches that death is the only just penalty for "the worst of the worst" - the small fraction of the nation's convicted murderers who have surrendered their right to live by the irredeemable viciousness of their crime. His credo is: "Some people deserve to die, and we have an obligation to kill them." Daryl Holton is one of those people. In 1997, Holton shot his four children to death with an assault rifle in Shelbyville, Tennessee. For these crimes, he was given four separate death sentences. In ROBERT BLECKER WANTS ME DEAD, we see the two men meet during Blecker's 2005 research trip to Riverbend maximum-security prison outside Nashville. For the next year and a half - by phone, by mail and even the occasional visit - the condemned man and the scholar warily spar with one another through a roller-coaster of death-watches, postponements and court-ordered stays, all the while exploring together the meaning of mercy, justice, and the morality of the death penalty.