ROBERT BLECKER WANTS ME DEAD
Directed by Ted Schillinger
Produced by Bruce David Klein
Released by Atlas Media Corp.
USA. 94 min. Not Rated
 

“Some people deserve to die, and we are obliged to execute them.”  That’s Robert Blecker’s creed. The compelling death penalty crusader is the rare outspoken advocate for capital punishment in the upper echelons of academia. Ted Schillinger’s documentary about the New York Law School professor is insightful, but, like his primary subject, overlooks moral complexities.

The film explores the improbable friendship between Blecker and Daryl Holton, a Tennessee father awaiting execution for killing his four children. A manipulative and unrepentant murderer, Holton defends his actions as altruistic—his kids lived in a crime-ridden housing project with his ex-wife. That warped logic, and the fact that Holton wants to die for his crimes, draws Blecker into a relationship with the child killer.

Blecker is likable and certain of his moral intuition, but nevertheless struggles to get his death row pen-pal to take responsibility and feel remorse for his actions. What ensues is a slow and frustrating point/counterpoint between the two men. One of Blecker’s cousins, Howard Estrin, best describes Holton as, “a different species”; talking to him is like trying to communicate with a fish.

Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead is thought provoking, but feels emotionally hollow for such a charged subject. If Schillinger’s aim was to delve into the broader societal impact of capital punishment, one wasted opportunity includes a detailed interview with Blecker’s mother—who is morally opposed to the death penalty. She simply quips, “One mistake and that’s a horror.”

On the other hand, if Schillinger wanted us to fully appreciate Blecker’s relationship with Holton, we needed to hear more about his crimes, especially from the mother of his slain children, which might have added more weight to Blecker’s argument that only the “worst of the worst” should be executed. Even a television news magazine piece would have included such an interview. Both Blecker, and thereby Schillinger, allow Holton’s intellectual ponderings to supersede an examination of the most obvious reason Holton killed his children. Was he most likely an abusive husband who lost control of his wife and punished her by killing the kids? That’s a question which needed a nuanced answer.

We learn that Blecker draws from ancient Greek and Hebrew beliefs to support his “retributivist” ideology: a just punishment is necessary for the morally guilty to suffer society’s sanctions. But by what means? “The electric chair, I guess…firing squad seems to be about the most appropriate,” says Becker. Such statements are unconscionable to his opponents, and some of his critics accuse Blecker of naivety in his assertion that capital punishment can be fairly administered. They also accuse the professor of trying to play God. But Schillinger never makes Blecker answer those charges in a substantive way, and instead allows him to ramble. An intriguing and passionate ramble, but not enough to satisfactorily address the issues. Elisa Klein
March 1, 2009