The Inverted Iconoclast
by Krishna Andavolu, Obit Magazine
MARCH 5, 2009
An excerpt of the review:
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.
Read the whole article at http://www.obit-mag.com/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5300
