Murder One

Documentary about the first human to donate his body to science so that it could be studied in the form of a 3D database of the entire anatomy that is available to view online. Convicted killer Joseph Paul Jernigan donated his body to science shortly before he was executed in 1993 and this documentary examines what took place after his death by lethal injection.

What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)

One night in November 1976, after his car breaks down on a road outside Dallas, Randall Dale Adams accepts a ride from teenager David Harris. Harris is driving a stolen vehicle and, later that night, when Dallas police officer Robert Wood pulls the car over to check its headlights, he is shot and killed. A jury believes Adams is the killer, but stylized reenactments and interviews with key figures, conflicting testimonies and evidence are presented to argue that Adams was framed by a corrupt justice system, ultimately leading to his exoneration.

British documentarian Nick Broomfield creates a follow-up piece to his 1992 documentary of the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, a highway prostitute who was convicted of killing six men in Florida between 1989 and 1990. Interviewing an increasingly mentally unstable Wuornos, Broomfield captures the distorted mind of a murderer whom the state of Florida deems of sound mind -- and therefore fit to execute. Throughout the film, Broomfield includes footage of his testimony at Wuornos' trial.

This documentary recounts the dysfunctional state of the death penalty in the state of California by revisiting the crimes, arrest, trials and appeals of Lawrence Bittaker, a convicted serial killer who has been on death row at San Quentin since 1981.

On June 3, 1973, a man was murdered in a busy intersection of San Francisco’s Chinatown as part of an ongoing gang war. Chol Soo Lee, a 20-year-old Korean immigrant who had previous run-ins with the law, was arrested and convicted based on flimsy evidence and the eyewitness accounts of white tourists who couldn’t distinguish between Asian features. Sentenced to life in prison, Chol Soo Lee would spend years fighting to survive behind bars before journalist K.W. Lee took an interest in his case. The intrepid reporter’s investigation would galvanize a first-of-its-kind pan-Asian American grassroots movement to fight for Chol Soo Lee’s freedom, ultimately inspiring a new generation of social justice activists.

Depicts the case of religious persecution suffered by the Christian Pakistani Asia Bibi (Aasiya Noreen), falsely accused of blasphemy in 2010 by a Pakistani court and was sentenced to death by hanging. In October 2018, the Supreme Court of Pakistan acquitted her based on insufficient evidence, though she was not allowed to leave Pakistan until the verdict was reviewed. She was held under armed guard and was not able to leave the country until 7 May 2019; she arrived in Canada the next day.

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A film about convicted drug smuggler Myuran Sukumaran, who became an accomplished artist before he was executed by firing squad in Indonesia in April 2015.

Scott Panetti was tried for the capital murder of his parents-in-law on September 8, 1992 in Gillespie County, Texas. He was subsequently sentenced to death on September 22, 1995. Panetti has an extensive history of mental illness, including schizophrenia, manic depression, auditory hallucinations and paranoia. Panetti was hospitalized, both voluntarily and involuntarily for mental illness fourteen times in six different hospitals before his arrest for capital murder in 1992. Following his conviction, Panetti’s former wife, and daughter of the victims, Sonja Alvarado, filed a petition stating that Panetti never should have been tried for the crimes as he was suffering from paranoid delusions at the time of the killings.

The hanging of child murderer, William Carr

In September 2021, France will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty. A decision so strong that it will symbolize, in itself, the first seven years of François Mitterrand. For Robert Badinter, it was the fight of a lifetime, rooted in a personal history marked by the rejection of injustice, which began after the arrest of his father by the Gestapo in 1943. A story told through archives and by his family and closest friends.

On 15 August 2004, a 16-year-old girl was hanged in a public square in Neka, a small Iranian town by the Caspian Sea. Atefeh Sahaaleh's death sentence was for "crimes against chastity". Despite Iran being a signatory to an international convention that promises not to sentence to death or execute those under 18, permission was obtained from Iran's Supreme Court by the local mullah and head of the city's administration to do exactly that. Eyewitness accounts and dramatic reconstructions, plus undercover filming in Atefah's hometown tell the powerful story of the life and tragic death of an ordinary girl.

Documentary about a Texan family who exercised a new state right to watch the execution of the man who brutally killed two of their children.

A depiction in the hanging of Edward Heinson, an assumed criminal assault convict in Jacksonville, Florida.

A camera crew follows Edward Earl Johnson, a man falsely convicted of rape and murder, during his last 14 days on death row. Everyone involved is interviewed, Johnson himself, his family, the warden, prison guards and other inmates. We also witness the futile attempts by his attorney to save his life.

Forty years after the abolition of the death penalty in France, voted on September 18, 1981, the guillotine remains in the collective imagination as the instrument of the death sentence. This machine, developed during the Revolution to render justice more equal, was presented as progress. Over time, opinion has been divided on the subject of the death penalty, the guillotine becoming the object of man's cruelty, a remnant of an archaic way of dispensing justice and fuelling the many debates around the death penalty and its abolition.

Three extraordinary people embark on journeys of recovery, discovery and rebellion and find themselves centre stage in the biggest capital punishment crisis in modern memory. The Penalty unearths an America where grieving families, botched executions and wrongful convictions force us to question what we think we know about the death penalty.

We do not know when and how we will die. Death Row inmates do. Werner Herzog embarks on a dialogue with Death Row inmates, asks questions about life and death and looks deep into these individuals, their stories, their crimes.

Today, the ritual of giving the last supper to the condemned person has been detached from its origin, and can be perceived to be as absurd as the punishment it accompanies. Mats Bigert & Lars Bergström's film “The Last Supper” focuses on this discrepancy between historical “meaning” and contemporary use of a tradition that has lost its connection with the past. The main character is the former death row chef Brian Price, who reconstructs one of the 200 final meals that he prepared during his time as inmate in Huntsville State Prison, Texas.