The conscience of capital punishment
Werner Herzog’s new documentary concerns capital punishment, and specifically two men on death row. I haven’t seen it yet — and passed up an opportunity Saturday night to see a screening of it followed by a Q&A with Herzog because I’m hoping to see the film with my son this weekend while I’m in San Francisco — but I’m eager to. Patrick Goldstein gives us a profile of Herzog and this new film. Best quote from it:
Being a journalist myself, I wanted to better understand Herzog’s own very public refusal to embrace capital punishment. He has repeatedly said that, as much as he loves living in America, he will not become a U.S. citizen as long as the country puts people to death.
“It is not a statement just about America,” he reminds me. “I cannot become a Chinese, Japanese, Russian or Egyptian citizen either, since they practice capital punishment too. I am from Germany, a country, in the time of the Nazis, that conducted an enormous campaign of capital punishment against its own citizens, and on top of that, carried out genocide against 6 million Jews. So from my standpoint, no state should be allowed to kill its citizens.”