This documentary looks inside a most unlikely friendship, between Robert Blecker, one of the country'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. And as the clock ticks down towards the day when Holton will walk to the electric chair, the two men explore together the meaning of mercy, courage, and the morality of the death penalty. All the while, Blecker continues his fight to keep capital punishment alive in the American justice system. The resulting portrait is funny, disturbing and vital: a penetratingly personal look at one of the most compelling and confounding moral questions of our time.
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Please leave your questions or comments for Robert Blecker and for Ted Schillinger, director of the film, to answer throughout the week.
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See extra scenes from the film at docs.msnbc.com
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Go behind the scenes in this web exclusive interivew with Robert Blecker.
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A letter from Ted Schillinger to the viewers:
For years, a majority of Americans have continued to support capital punishment, in spite of a determined national campaign against it. I have always believed that Americans are guided by their decency and generosity of spirit, so why do we show this loyalty to such an apparently bloodthirsty policy? I think Professor Robert Blecker has the answer. Americans maintain a deep faith in the old-fashioned idea of fairness. So does Blecker. The first thing that struck me about him was not the ferocity of his arguments, but the intensity of his listening. For every argument he brandished in favor of the death penalty, he invited and awaited my strongest counter-argument. Clearly he was hoping that I would score points against him, help him hone his arguments, even make him a little smarter. I don't know if I ever helped him, but Daryl Holton certainly did. In Holton, a murderer of children and self-taught legal whiz, Robert Blecker found a worthy adversary. And, stunningly, a fri end. Witnessing their extraordinary battle to find the meaning of Holton's crime, it was instantly obvious that here was a proving ground for Blecker's most passionately-held beliefs. And a test of both men's humanity, killer and scholar. Making a film that looks deep inside that friendship was draining, disturbing and, ultimately, exhilarating.
-Ted Schillinger
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