Werner Herzog conducts interviews with two murderers: one on death row (Michael Perry) and one sitting out a life sentence (Jason Burkett). He also speaks to people related to the victims and the perpetrators.
Initially Herzog had wanted to shoot footage of five people on death row in both Texas and Florida, but later decided to focus on Perry’s case for Into the Abyss. The footage of the other four inmates can be seen in a television series called On Death Row.
The documentary is not a complaint against capital punishment, even though Herzog comments in the beginning of the film that he is in fact opposed to it. Rather, it is about why people in Texas kill and end up in crime
The conversation Herzog has with a former captain of Death House – the person that provided for the one on death row, gave him the last meal and brought him to the gurney to strap him down – made a deep impression on me. The former captain tells Herzog how, one day, he had to bring a woman to the gurney and that’s when he suddenly realized he couldn’t go on doing his job anymore. It was affecting him too much.
We can see an interview with Burkett’s wife – who married him while he was already in prison – in which becomes clear that she has gotten pregnant even though she is only allowed to hug and kiss her husband when she meets him in prison. He’s not even allowed to wear a wedding ring.
Herzog conducted the interview with Perry eight days before he would be executed. The sister and daughter of two of his victims, relays her experience watching Perry get the lethal injection. We can read his last statement.
I can’t help but feel that somehow an excuse is being sought for the actions of the murderers: they had a lousy childhood, father doing drugs and doing time, mother working all the time, brothers introducing them to the wrong people, making wrong choices. This just doesn’t seem right to me. I completely get what Herzog says to Michael Perry at the start of the documentary: that he’s opposed to capital punishment, but that it doesn’t necessarily mean that he likes Perry. That’s the way I feel. However, the documentary didn’t leave me feeling satisfied or fulfilled.
The ideas behind capital punishment completely elude me. Who are we to determine when someone, who’s perfectly healthy, should die? To murder someone who has murdered; it’s so ‘an-eye-for-an-eye’. I’ve had discussions with my students about it last year, and it surprises me that most of them are actually pro capital punishment being re-introduced in the Dutch law system. A lot of them are vengeful. That scares me.
