Robert Blecker is a professor at New York Law School, best-known for being one of the most active public proponents for the death penalty. He’s a retributivist who likes to quote Socrates and the law of Solon when arguing the death penalty isn’t just a judicial but a moral imperative, just retribution for the worst of the worst. Ted Schillinger’s documentary Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead follows Blecker through his tangled relationship with Tennessee death row inmate Daryl Holton.

Having spent hours on death row to document life there — convinced most people would be shocked at what Blecker feels is the obscenity of rapists and murderers playing softball and watching TV while waiting for the end — Blecker became involved with Holton. Holton had killed his four children after they’d been assigned to his ex-wife; his explanation was that he wanted to spare them from a hellish life with their neglectful mother. He also planned to kill his wife’s new lover’s kid, but didn’t and instead promptly turned himself in. Holton had refused to aid his defense at this trial at all, turned down all appeals and appeared to want to die. Blecker was sucked in and kept returning for conversations for the next year-and-a-half; their last interview, the day before Daryl’s execution, couldn’t be filmed.

Schillinger’s doc is shot on what could be kindly called sub-consumer-grade video, which makes it irritating. Nonetheless, it’s the first genuinely troubling and provocative documentary I’ve seen, maybe since Josh Aronson’s Sound And Fury. Blecker does all the work here, constantly questioning every instinct and position he takes on-screen, cross-sectioning himself in articulate real-time — especially after Holton launches a last-minute appeal with the Supreme Court, forcing Blecker to question Holton’s sincerity and why the appeal angers him so much. The film ends on the night of Holton’s execution: on one side pro-death penalty advocates won’t listen to Blecker, who feels that Holton’s death by electric chair (as opposed to lethal injection) is disproportionately cruel to his crime. On the other side, anti-death penalty people keeping vigil want nothing to do with a man who’s opposed to their position. The film ends with remarkable ambivalence, with Blecker literally standing in the dark between two sides. It’s a powerful image, but I wondered if it was misleading; it’s Blecker himself, after all, who invokes the Heisenberg principle on-screen.

So I went downtown to Blecker’s Law School office and talked with him about the film and how it turned out. The tireless Blecker gives meaty, multi-paragraph answers with complete responsiveness, occasionally apologizing for their length. After it was over, he said he was tired of talking about the death penalty; he’s thinking of turning his energies somewhere else. For now, though, we talked about death.

When did Ted Schillinger get in touch with you, and when he approached you with this project, did he tell you about his own views on capital punishment?I met with Bruce Klein, who owns Atlas [Media, the production company]. I have tens of hours of footage and many years in maximum-security death row prisons. I’ve been looking to make — and still am — my own documentaries, so I was looking for an experienced partner that would help shape them. Bruce came down to this office and I showed him footage that I’d shot. About two or three hours in, he cut me off in mid-sentence and said “I’m not interested in making a documentary with you.” I said, “Huh.” He said, “But I am interested in making a documentary about you.” “What?” He said, “Well I think you’re a more interesting story than the guys you’re talking to.” So I was skeptical about that. He said “I have the perfect person to make this documentary,” and that was Ted. We met preliminarily to talk, and his views — to answer your question directly, was I aware of his views on the death penalty? I certainly was, that we didn’t share them. I was also immediately aware of how bright and articulate he was, and how committed he seemed to be to trying to understand the perspective, even if he rejected it. It took 2-3 months of discussion before I agreed to let it happen this way and put off my own plans to make a documentary.

So what’s the documentary you think you got?
It’s a very different documentary. It started out to be about me.

At what point did it become about Daryl?
About our relationship? Maybe it is about Daryl. I mean technically, if you look at the title, Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead, the Me is Daryl. So in that sense, you could argue that the title and movie are about Daryl.

Pretty early on, even before Ted came to terms with Bruce to be the director, I was meeting with Daryl for those four hours, presumably just a few days before he was supposed to be executed. Ted’s not even officially on-board at this point, but he has a sense that this is a very dramatic situation and it’s worth it for him to come down to Tennessee. So we did a two-camera shoot in which I’m shooting Daryl and he’s shooting me shooting Daryl. We didn’t know — well, I never knew anything, because Ted never really consulted with me about how the film was shaping up as he saw it. But we both knew he had guessed right in the sense that when Daryl wasn’t executed — when he got his stay and our relationship continued and ripened and deepened — it became clear that Daryl’s story would play a critical part.

At one point, Daryl warned me: “Don’t turn into Capote on me, where you need me dead in order to finish your documentary.” And the irony is, I never turned into Capote. Ted did, because Ted is an abolitionist against the death penalty, and as a good story, the story can only end one way: Daryl’s gotta die. From my perspective, as I told Daryl in a letter, “I don’t need you dead. It’s an interesting story either way.” It’s either the story of the struggle of a guy who wants to be executed and the system won’t carry through with its threat, or it’s the story of a guy who gets what he wants — or at least when that’s what I felt he wanted.

You seem increasingly ambivalent over the course of the film about Daryl specifically, not your position on the death penalty overall. And the ending is extremely dramatic and has you between those two camps, which works for me, but I’m not sure represents how you felt overall, because that’s where the film ends.
That’s where the film ends. That’s not where I end. It worked as a metaphor, and it was odd that it worked that way. It increasingly reflected an ambivalence after Daryl was dead. I was waiting for the letter from Daryl that I knew he must’ve written to me on death-watch right before he was executed. I used to check my mail every day, waiting for the letter to come. Because he had to have sent it, right? He had to. Well it never came. Never wrote it.

But I sort of discovered a letter to me he did write, in a manila envelope that I had put away and never read, because it was a time we were deeply estranged. He had sent me a report from social services, at the time when his wife had gotten custody of the kids. That report was remarkable, because it talked about all of Daryl’s sacrifices. He’d given up his army career, come home from Saudi Arabia, his wife had abandoned — this doesn’t come through [in the film]. She abandoned the children. The irony in that report is that the recommendation is, “He should be reunited with the children as quickly as possible, but we should be careful because his wife is not reliable and shouldn’t be left alone with the kids.” And so increasingly, after he was dead, a different kind of portrait emerged. I felt distraught that I might have misjudged him and been overly harsh with him. And you said, an ambivalence not about the death penalty, but about Daryl. And you’re quite right. He isn’t the best candidate, from my perspective.

Is this one of those cases you talk about, about how there needs to be less executions and more carefully chosen ones? Did you think Daryl was one of the exceptions?
One of the things I advocate — and this doesn’t come through in the movie — is a higher burden of persuasion in death penalty situations in terms of the emotional. That is, it’s not enough that you’re convinced beyond a lingering doubt that he did it; you have to be convinced to a moral certainty that he deserves it. That’s something greater than proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And if you ask me now if I’m convinced to a moral certainty that Daryl Holton deserved to die, my answer is no. He did it to spare himself from the pain of being apart from his children, but he did love his children. Had it been a truly altruistic killing, had he really killed them under the delusion that he was doing it for their sake, they were better off dead, I wouldn’t on balance think he deserved to die. But he didn’t. So on balance, he deserved to die. I’m convinced beyond a reasonable doubt he deserved to die. I’m not convinced to a moral certainty he deserved to die. And if I really believe in the burden of persuasion I claim to publicly, then I as a juror should vote no.

The thing that struck me watching the movie is that you’re willing to question your own motives before anyone can even ask. So I get a sense of you thinking through all this on-screen. But I wonder if you feel you’ve been presented fairly on-screen.
[Pause] There are no cheap shots. And it’s not spun. Which are remarkable statements to make, given that it’s an abolitionist filmmaker. Ted deserves an enormous amount of credit. I trusted him, I opened up to him, and I knew I was enormously vulnerable to editing. He let me see one rush. Remember the swimming scene in Maine? At one point I was doing a crawl toward the camera, and coming up and over it with my mouth and eyes wide open — it made Jaws look tame. Had he wanted to, he could have of course have included that shot — which made me look like a monster — as a metaphor. Yes, there are moments when I look foolish, when everyone’s bored and I’m babbling on and I look like a jerk — but I am a jerk sometimes, I am foolish sometimes, and that was honest, that was fair. I regret some things that aren’t there. I mean, no film that’s an hour-and-a-half plus could really go all the way. My students are captive audiences for 28 classes, so they get it — although I co-teach it with a leading abolitionist, so they get a balanced perspective, always, because I’m committed to that. You’re right, I do think about it a lot, because I’m a retributivist, not a sadist, and there can be a very small gap, a very significant gap but a very small gap, so you have to be very careful that you don’t turn into a sadist.

What’s missing that you wish was there?
When I first met Daryl, his immediate response when he heard I was a law professor from New York was, “Do you know Jim Liebman?” James Liebman is a Columbia law-school professor who was the chief author of a very famous study — sometimes called the Liebman study, sometimes called the Columbia study — that showed 68% of all death penalties are reversed on appeal in the modern era. Liebman and I debated publicly a few times and discovered that though he’s an abolitionist and I’m a proponent of the death penalty, we have common ground, which is that if you really care about reducing the error rate, you should limit the death penalty only to the worst of the worst. So I knew Liebman, and I told Daryl that and his eyes lit up — the revered James Liebman, from whom he’d learned all his law.

As Daryl faces death, and I’m to meet him with only a few days left, I’m very conflicted, because it seems to me very unfair that — just like I expose my students to both sides — it seemed unfair that mine would be the only voice Daryl would hear, and it would be a voice telling him to die, that he didn’t have a voice telling him to live. So I called up Jim and I said “Jim, there’s this guy Daryl Holton who thinks the world of you. I’ve been interviewing him on death row, and I’ve got some video and I’d like to show it to you. He’s due to die in a few days.” I showed him some clips from Daryl, and then I said to him “Jim, is there anything you’d like to say to Daryl?” He said, “Why, are you going to show him whatever I say?” I said, “Sure.” So I took the camera and turned it on Liebman and he gave a 20-minute talk to Daryl in which he was very dignified, very gentle, in which he said “Daryl, I can’t make your decision. I’m very flattered that you think so highly of me and the treatise [on habeas corpus] I co-authored. I can’t tell you whether to live or die, but I can see your respect for the law. And what I would say to you is, if you really do respect the law, you should appreciate that very much part of the legal process is the appellate process. And if you want to demonstrate your respect for the law, you would do that by appealing and submitting your trial to the judgment of appellate judges as well.” It was just brilliant.

So when the appropriate moment came for Daryl to break for a cigarette and lunch break in our four-hour meeting, I showed him. I said “Daryl, I have something you might want to see” and turned the computer around. How he knew it was Liebman I don’t know, how he saw a picture of him I don’t know. For the next 20 minutes, he just listened and his eyes opened wide. He was visibly moved by it and took the break right afterward. I’m not claiming that’s the reason, but four or five days later he picks up his appeal.

You’ve talked a lot about presenting both sides, and you do this a lot in the movie. When you’re presenting yourself that way in the movie, do you think that helps or hurts your cause?
There’s a common statement that hard cases make bad law, and in some sense, hard cases make difficult polemics. This movie’s not a polemic; this is not my argument for the death penalty. I allowed Ted to follow me around for a year-and-a-half and allowed him to see what I go through. Where there’s something to be said against the position, where you feel something on balance but there are two sides, one of which predominates but the other of which is significant, I let Ted see it. I go through that. I’ve appeared in the media occasionally to argue against the death penalty. The media tends to want you to take a clear position. When I’m interviewed by producers before deciding whether to have me on, they’re looking for a voice to articulate a position clearly. But the death penalty is a very complex issue. So: if this was supposed to be a polemic, then no, I wouldn’t have revealed myself to Ted. I would’ve gotten hired someone to help me make my movie.

But if you knew that the best-case scenario wouldn’t be a polemic for you, why did you take the time and trouble to do it?
Because I didn’t know Daryl was going to become the star! First of all, had Daryl been executed when he was originally scheduled to be executed, this film wouldn’t have been about Daryl principally. I had no idea where this was going. This started out to be about me and the struggle in the academic environment — probably one of 3 or 5% of faculty in northeastern institutions of higher learning who supports the death penalty. I’m just a mainstream American; I agree with about 80% of my fellow citizens about the death penalty. It just began as an opportunity to get my perspective — our perspective — in a way that had never been done before. There have been no documentaries, to the best of my knowledge, ever made, except for abolitionist polemics. So I didn’t know where anything was going. I just wanted an honest portrait. That’s the promise I got from Bruce and Ted, that this would be honest and accurate and there would be nothing inconsistent with your published views and nothing inconsistent with your honest, expressed views. So it seemed a worthwhile thing to do.