The Inverted Iconoclast
by Krishna Andavolu
MARCH 5, 2009 TAGS:
Anti-death-penalty activists often lament the company the United States keeps by its continued use of capital punishment. Do we really want to be like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, China, Iran or Libya, nations that also execute people? Aren’t we, as a highly developed country, more akin to Great Britain, France or Australia, countries that have abolished the death penalty long ago? And shouldn’t we be ashamed that countries like Cambodia, Rwanda and Haiti have abolished capital punishment before we have?
What is clear, is that America’s relationship to the death penalty is unlike anywhere else in the world. It is an “ongoing crucible for the deepest-held ideas about what is just in America,” according to Ted Schillinger, director of the compelling new documentary Robert Blecker Wants me Dead.
Schillinger’s film, which follows the relationship between Robert Blecker, a vociferous, hyperactive proponent of the death penalty and Daryl Holton, a death row inmate in Tennessee, attempts to isolate capital punishment’s ethical core from the mille feuille layers of nuance that surround the practice.
Blecker, a professor at New York Law School, is a self-avowed retributivist, a category that denies easy compartmentalization--as much as it denies easy pronunciation. Simply put, he believes in a 3rd way: fewer people should go to death row, but the worst of the worst, the most heinous transgressors of human law, should be killed.
He is an iconoclast, one of the few pro-death penalty voices in the legal academy and a zealot who articulates what would seem to be a basic ethical and jurisprudential premise: the punishment should fit the crime.
But Blecker’s beliefs are more psychologically complicated than that. Citing the Ancient Greek legal scholar Solon, Blecker refers to the anachronistic concept of “blood pollution,” the poisoning of humanity by the presence of evil-doers. In scene after scene of barnstorming rhetoric of retribution, he describes his very emotional response to killers--hatred and anger--and circumscribes a truly Manichean worldview of good and evil.
What seems to form the film’s subtext is the question, why don’t more people share Blecker’s visceral reaction towards killers? Perhaps the majority of Americans do. Year after year polls show that upwards of 70 percent of Americans believe in capital punishment. A recent Gallup poll showed that 48 percent of those asked think that the death penalty is not used often enough.
With public opinion and the status quo on his side (36 states in the U.S. practice the death penalty), shouldn’t Blecker be a populist champion, a scholar who debunks elite orthodoxy and allows emotion, vengeance, anger and even hate to inform valid legal reasoning?
We begin to see why he is not through Blecker’s conversations with Daryl Holton, a frighteningly callous quadruple killer scheduled to die, who Blecker quixotically attempts to understand, unpack and force into remorse. This relationship forms the central stage of the film and Schillinger adeptly hints that answers about ethics, vengeance and the whole rationale behind capital punishment might precipitate from this interaction. It’s a head fake.
Once we are in the interview room at Riverbend Penitentiary in Nashville, Tennessee, the film becomes more anthropological and less philosophical. It transforms into a study of two individuals so steeped in the rhetoric, logic and argumentation of the death penalty and capital punishment and so self-exiled into their respective cul-de sacs of thinking that they bounce off one another with the illusion that they are making headway. They do form a friendship of sorts, but we are never privy to any great truths about crime and punishment.
It is unclear whether Holton is as engaged with the proceedings as Blecker. Holton is on death row, and presumably has fewer chances to connect and speak with people than Blecker. Holton’s crime, killing his four children for supposedly altruistic reasons, is maniacal, and he plays the part of the personable psychopath to a tee.
What does become clear is that the motives and ethics behind both Holton’s crimes and Blecker’s 3rd way are as subjective as possible. Neither of these systems should form the basis of any public policy.
Blecker’s hatred for killers and hyper-empathy for victims is a gut, visceral feeling. His faith in those emotions, in fact, opens the door for the opposite argument. Shouldn’t those who feel in their gut that the state has no place killing people be afforded the same argumentative weight?
Credit should go to Schillinger for making a mostly un-didactic film that uses the force of character and narrative to draw out these questions, rather than 11th hour drama and boilerplate filmic conventions. It is clear that Schillinger, who is open about his anti-death-penalty stance, enjoys being right in the middle of the debate as much as Blecker does.
What the film consciously leaves out is the panoply of complicating factors that surround the ethical core of capital punishment, the systemic problems in its application like racism, poverty and access to competent counsel. Perhaps the film seeks to demonstrate that there is no perfect laboratory to isolate the ethical core of what is just.
Even if we take as given that most people in this country believe that there are some crimes that deserve the ultimate punishment, it doesn’t seem like there needs to be a champion of that cause. In fact, it would be the opposite. The death penalty, like death itself, is cordoned off into an unseen corner of the public consciousness. Its power is in its symbolism, rather than its execution. After all, we don’t behead people in the public square, do we?
And so Blecker is lost wandering between two camps, as he is literally depicted doing at the end of the film on the night of Horton’s execution (Sept 12, 2007). He is talking rapidly to the camera, in his familiar, rattling rhythms. But no one else seems to be listening.
--
Robert Blecker Wants me Dead is playing at Cinema Village on 12th St. in Manhattan, and opens on March 13th in Washington D.C.
Official movie site: HERE.
--
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States Reconsider Death Penalty Amidst Budget Crisis
by Krishna Andavolu
Is Capital punishment fiscally responsible? Some lawmakers say no.
A Blunt Instrument
by Thomas J. Fitzgerald
Long before New Jersey legislators voted to repeal the state's death penalty last week, the ultimate punishment had become the political equivalent of the human appendix, a vestigial organ that performs no useful function.
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Humor of the Gallows
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Krishna Andavolu is managing editor of Obit.
What is clear, is that America’s relationship to the death penalty is unlike anywhere else in the world. It is an “ongoing crucible for the deepest-held ideas about what is just in America,” according to Ted Schillinger, director of the compelling new documentary Robert Blecker Wants me Dead.Schillinger’s film, which follows the relationship between Robert Blecker, a vociferous, hyperactive proponent of the death penalty and Daryl Holton, a death row inmate in Tennessee, attempts to isolate capital punishment’s ethical core from the mille feuille layers of nuance that surround the practice.
Blecker, a professor at New York Law School, is a self-avowed retributivist, a category that denies easy compartmentalization--as much as it denies easy pronunciation. Simply put, he believes in a 3rd way: fewer people should go to death row, but the worst of the worst, the most heinous transgressors of human law, should be killed.
He is an iconoclast, one of the few pro-death penalty voices in the legal academy and a zealot who articulates what would seem to be a basic ethical and jurisprudential premise: the punishment should fit the crime.
But Blecker’s beliefs are more psychologically complicated than that. Citing the Ancient Greek legal scholar Solon, Blecker refers to the anachronistic concept of “blood pollution,” the poisoning of humanity by the presence of evil-doers. In scene after scene of barnstorming rhetoric of retribution, he describes his very emotional response to killers--hatred and anger--and circumscribes a truly Manichean worldview of good and evil.
What seems to form the film’s subtext is the question, why don’t more people share Blecker’s visceral reaction towards killers? Perhaps the majority of Americans do. Year after year polls show that upwards of 70 percent of Americans believe in capital punishment. A recent Gallup poll showed that 48 percent of those asked think that the death penalty is not used often enough.
With public opinion and the status quo on his side (36 states in the U.S. practice the death penalty), shouldn’t Blecker be a populist champion, a scholar who debunks elite orthodoxy and allows emotion, vengeance, anger and even hate to inform valid legal reasoning?
We begin to see why he is not through Blecker’s conversations with Daryl Holton, a frighteningly callous quadruple killer scheduled to die, who Blecker quixotically attempts to understand, unpack and force into remorse. This relationship forms the central stage of the film and Schillinger adeptly hints that answers about ethics, vengeance and the whole rationale behind capital punishment might precipitate from this interaction. It’s a head fake.
Once we are in the interview room at Riverbend Penitentiary in Nashville, Tennessee, the film becomes more anthropological and less philosophical. It transforms into a study of two individuals so steeped in the rhetoric, logic and argumentation of the death penalty and capital punishment and so self-exiled into their respective cul-de sacs of thinking that they bounce off one another with the illusion that they are making headway. They do form a friendship of sorts, but we are never privy to any great truths about crime and punishment.
It is unclear whether Holton is as engaged with the proceedings as Blecker. Holton is on death row, and presumably has fewer chances to connect and speak with people than Blecker. Holton’s crime, killing his four children for supposedly altruistic reasons, is maniacal, and he plays the part of the personable psychopath to a tee.
What does become clear is that the motives and ethics behind both Holton’s crimes and Blecker’s 3rd way are as subjective as possible. Neither of these systems should form the basis of any public policy.
Blecker’s hatred for killers and hyper-empathy for victims is a gut, visceral feeling. His faith in those emotions, in fact, opens the door for the opposite argument. Shouldn’t those who feel in their gut that the state has no place killing people be afforded the same argumentative weight?
Credit should go to Schillinger for making a mostly un-didactic film that uses the force of character and narrative to draw out these questions, rather than 11th hour drama and boilerplate filmic conventions. It is clear that Schillinger, who is open about his anti-death-penalty stance, enjoys being right in the middle of the debate as much as Blecker does.
What the film consciously leaves out is the panoply of complicating factors that surround the ethical core of capital punishment, the systemic problems in its application like racism, poverty and access to competent counsel. Perhaps the film seeks to demonstrate that there is no perfect laboratory to isolate the ethical core of what is just.
Even if we take as given that most people in this country believe that there are some crimes that deserve the ultimate punishment, it doesn’t seem like there needs to be a champion of that cause. In fact, it would be the opposite. The death penalty, like death itself, is cordoned off into an unseen corner of the public consciousness. Its power is in its symbolism, rather than its execution. After all, we don’t behead people in the public square, do we?
And so Blecker is lost wandering between two camps, as he is literally depicted doing at the end of the film on the night of Horton’s execution (Sept 12, 2007). He is talking rapidly to the camera, in his familiar, rattling rhythms. But no one else seems to be listening.
--
Robert Blecker Wants me Dead is playing at Cinema Village on 12th St. in Manhattan, and opens on March 13th in Washington D.C.
Official movie site: HERE.
--
Related Stories:
States Reconsider Death Penalty Amidst Budget Crisisby Krishna Andavolu
Is Capital punishment fiscally responsible? Some lawmakers say no.
A Blunt Instrumentby Thomas J. Fitzgerald
Long before New Jersey legislators voted to repeal the state's death penalty last week, the ultimate punishment had become the political equivalent of the human appendix, a vestigial organ that performs no useful function.
Humor of the Gallowsby Tom Ferrick, Jr.
In the world of oxymorons, gallows humor is up there with jumbo shrimp.
Krishna Andavolu is managing editor of Obit.
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