FrontSeet

Robert Blecker is one of the country’s most impassioned crusaders for capital punishment. A self-described ‘emotive retributivist’ and New York Law School professor, his credo is “Some people deserve to die, and we have an obligation to kill them.” Daryl Holton is one of those people. In 1997, Holton shot his four children to death with an assault rifle in Shelbyville, Tennessee. For these crimes, he received four separate death sentences. The two men met in 2005, during Blecker’s research trip to Riverbend maximum-security prison. ROBERT BLECKER WANTS ME DEAD tells the story of the unlikely friendship that develops between them, as the condemned man and the scholar explore together the meaning of mercy, justice, and the morality of the death penalty.