“I tell people all the time, I’m either going home, or home.”
Werner Herzog is a filmmaker who’s always been a fan of fascinating topics of discussion based in reality much more than many other documentary filmmakers that I’ve followed over the years. He tries, in every film he makes, to find the human core that comes from the topic he’s exploring, whether it be a newly discovered and preserved cave of art from the days before documented history or the story of a pair of activists in Alaska living among grizzly bears. Here Herzog decides to look into the death penalty, the people who’re going to be experiencing it, those who narrowly escaped its conclusion, those who clamour for it, and those who enact it.
I have some very strong feelings about the death penalty as I am from one of the few nations in the world which still allows for it within the country’s law. It hasn’t been enacted in some time, but if a case comes along that’s bad enough I’m pretty sure that government can find time to fashion a noose. So for a film like this, an impartial look at the people all surrounding capital punishment, it takes my feelings and just amplifies them because 
I see what I believe to be wrong and am able to prove my arguments against the act of murder. What makes the film truly impartial is that at the same time I see all the evidence for all those people who I know to be pro the death penalty, which in the age of the Morgan Spurlocks and Michael Moores I’m always happy to see a documentary as profound as this able to make a journalistic approach to a very delicate topic.
The film takes a piece by piece look at not only what this makes everyone involved feel but also how everyone came to be where they are at the point of this film. We’re taken through the investigation into the case in question and made to understand that this is not a Thin Blue Line situation in which the two subjects, Jason Burkett and Michael Perry, are innocent and are looking to change their fates. So with that moment of question out of the way we’re left with the impending doom that Michael is to face with his execution to be performed within a fortnight. We hear Michael’s feelings about what he’s done, what he thinks he’s done, what he expects to happen on his day to come and how it all makes him feel right now.
That is also mirror through the testimonies of the victims’ survived family and her feelings on the culprits. Without judging her, since she stands on the opposite side of my side of the argument, it’s not hard for me to empathize with her. The moments we have with Sandra Stolter as she sits there discussing the day she found out that three of her family members had been murdered can do nothing but draw empathy from the audience. The emotions are raw and without a filter, except that which has been developed over years of coming to terms I can imagine, which shows true throughout the movie.
Some documentaries exist to edify its audience about something that happened, or is happening in the world we live in. This documentary exists to force us all to ponder certain questions of morality, and if you’re one of the few people in the world who is yet to decide what side of the line you stand on the topic of capital punishment then this movie is meant to force you into thinking about it and hopefully eventually get you to make a decision.