Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead

Plot Summary

Robert Blecker is one of the country's most impassioned crusaders for capital punishment, A self-described "emotive retributivist," he teaches at New York Law School. 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. 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 murdered his four children with an assault rifle in Shelbyville, Tennessee. For these crimes, he was given four separate death sentences. The two men meet on Blecker's 2005 research trip to Riverbend maximum-security prison outside Nashville. For the next year and a half 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. An official selection of the USA Film Festival, the Cork International Film Festival, the Rhode Island Film Festival, and the Honolulu International Film Festival.