 How on earth can Robert Blecker and Daryl Holton be friends? That question pulses at the center of ROBERT BLECKER WANTS ME DEAD, a surprising and often disturbing documentary film about passion, murder, and the American death penalty. New York Law School professor Robert Blecker is one of America’s most impassioned crusaders for capital punishment. His fundamental credo is: "Some people deserve to die, and it’s our obligation to kill them."
Daryl Holton is one of those people. In 1997, Holton coolly and methodically murdered his four children in Shelbyville, Tennessee. 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. Blecker discovers to his shock that not only does Holton possess a keen legal mind and a wry sense of humor, but that he has declined to file his permitted appeals and seems to invite his own execution with a mixture of calm and even courage. The two men discover a strange philosophical kinship.
So begins a puzzling and engrossing friendship. Over the next year and a half the two men explore the meaning of mercy, justice, and the morality of the death penalty. But since the clock is ticking down toward Holton’s last moment, Tennessee’s electric chair will grimly test both Holton’s apparent certainty, and Blecker’s lifelong dedication to his lethal theory of justice…
WINNER - Honolulu International Film Festival
"(This) emotionally charged film is a challenge well worth rising to."
John P. Meyer, USA FILM FEST
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