''Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead'' is an independent documentary film about retributivist

death penalty Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty and formerly called judicial homicide, is the state-sanctioned killing of a person as punishment for actual or supposed misconduct. The sentence ordering that an offender be punished in s ...

advocate Robert Blecker and his relationship with Daryl Holton, a

death row Death row, also known as condemned row, is a place in a prison that houses inmates awaiting execution after being convicted of a capital crime and sentenced to death. The term is also used figuratively to describe the state of awaiting executio ...

inmate who murdered his own four children, and who was executed by the state of Tennessee in September 2007. The film was directed by Ted Schillinger and produced by Bruce David Klein. The film was completed in November 2007 and made its world premiere on April 25, 2008, at the USA Film Festival in

Dallas, Texas Dallas () is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the most populous city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the List of Texas metropolitan areas, most populous metropolitan area in Texas and the Metropolitan statistical area, fourth-most ...

, as an official selection of the festival. The film was also an official selection of the 2008 Rhode Island Film Festival and the 2008 Cork Film Festival. It won a Gold Kahuna Award at the 2009 Honolulu International Film Festival. ''Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead'' was released theatrically on February 27, 2009. ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'' said the film was "compelling" and ''Film Journal International'' called it "captivating." ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'', locally known as ''The'' ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'' or ''WP'', is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C., the national capital. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington m ...

'' described it as a fascinating look at "the vast amount of wiggle room between being for the death penalty and being against it."''Washington Post'' review
/ref> The film made its television premiere on April 19, 2009, on

MSNBC MSNBC is an American cable news channel owned by the NBCUniversal News Group division of NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast. Launched on July 15, 1996, and headquartered at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, the channel primarily broadcasts r ...

. It was released on

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for digital video disc or digital versatile disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...

in 2010.

References

External links

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Variety article referring to production of filmRadio interview with Robert Blecker about the filmFLYP multimedia article on the film
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200407180023/http://www.flypmedia.com/issues/26/#11/1 , date=2020-04-07
''Robert Blecker Wants Me Dead'' on Rotten Tomatoes
2008 films Documentary films about capital punishment in the United States 2000s English-language films American independent films American documentary films American prison films 2000s American films English-language documentary films