Summary

An engrossing and often disturbing documentary that looks inside the puzzling and unlikely friendship between Robert Blecker, one of America’s most impassioned crusaders for capital punishment, and Daryl Holton, a mass murderer awaiting execution on Tennessee’s death row.

Blecker, a professor at New York Law School, shares some startling common ground with Holton: both believe that the death penalty is a just and necessary punishment. For a year and a half – by phone, mail and even the occasional visit – the condemned man who wants to die and the scholar who believes he should warily spar with one another through a roller-coaster of death-watches, postponements and court-ordered stays. As the clock ticks down towards the day when Holton will walk to the electric chair, they explore together the meaning of mercy, courage, and the morality of the death penalty.

The resulting portrait is funny, disturbing and vital: Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead is a penetratingly personal look at one of the most compelling and confounding moral questions of our time.