Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead - the Film

I've known Robert Blecker since 1982, when I became his colleague on the faculty of New York Law School.  And for that entire time, the central focus of his scholarly attention has been on the issue of punishment, and most particularly the death penalty.  Robert describes himself as an emotive retributivist - that is, someone who believes that in the process of meting out punishment for criminal behavior, our concern should be to see that people get their just deserts - a punishment that fits the crime - and he couples that with a belief that certain crimes merit the death penalty, and therefore it should be applied in appropriate cases.  He has advanced this view through a variety of media, but here is a new venture for him: becoming the subject of somebody else's film, subjecting himself to somebody else's vision.  And I'm not sure that he comes through it to his own satisfaction, and certainly not to mine, because the film makes him look more obsessive and at times less reasonable than I think he is.  On the other hand, I have a fundamental disagreement with him, in that I believe that even if we were to agree that certain offenses merit death, I am unwilling to impose that penalty when the system we have for determining who should die is inherently flawed and, I believe, incapable of being made certain.

For my view is that if one accepts Blecker's contention that life is infinitely valuable and precious, then we should not entrust the decision to extinguish a life to a system that is capable of getting it wrong....  I agree with his mother, who says in the film, in effect, that the execution of even one innocent person is one too many.

But to get back to the film.  I think it is a flawed film in many ways, but on the other hand it presents a compelling story, if haltingly and frustratingly at times, and it does the most important thing that art can do: it provokes the audience to think more deeply about a subject as to which it is too easy to avoid deep thought by clinging to familiar, superficial arguments. 

While working on a project to document the "soft life" that too many death rows provide to their occupants -- at least in his view -- Blecker came across a death row inmate who provoked his interest as being atypical, an apparently intelligent and very articulate man who appeared to support the idea of his own execution, but without being willing to articulate any remorse for the crime he committed -- the simultaneous murder by shotgun of his four young children.  Blecker ended up visiting him several times and exchanging correspondence with him up to the time of his execution; indeed, Blecker was his last visitor on the date of execution.   A relationship of sorts grew up between them, a relationship that would be hard to understand without seeing and hearing the film AND seeing and hearing Blecker respond to audience questions after the film.  And this is one of the flaws of the film, I think.  It doesn't do justice in communicating the full richness of Blecker's journey through this relationship.  It leaves out too much, perhaps because film is a visual medium and you can only do so much of reading correspondence out loud before you put the audience to sleep.  I doubt that documentary film is the medium to convey fully the extent and impact of this experience on Blecker and the subtle ways it has affected his position on the death penalty.  It was only in the Q&A after the showing this evening that was held as a benefit for NYLS that I felt we reached some kind of deeper understanding of how the experience affected him.

In short - I think Robert Blecker should turn this experience into a book, the medium that can do justice to the experience in all its detail....  But, in the meantime, I hope lots of people see the movie because it is important to have one's preconceptions challenged in this way.