Can someone convicted of a horrific crime ever be redeemed? And can the victims ever truly get justice?
Those are some of the questions implicitly posed in the documentary, “I Am Ready, Warden,” about Texas death row inmate John Henry Ramirez’s pursuit of redemption before his execution in 2022.
The film was recently named on a short list of contenders for the Best Documentary Short Film Oscar, putting a spotlight on not only the moral questions surrounding executions but, by association, Texas’ unique position in putting people to death. We’ve executed far more people than any other state, and racial disparities continue to exist. Update: On Jan, 23, it was announced that “I Am Ready, Warden” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short.
Ramirez was executed for the murder of Pablo Castro, who was stabbed 29 times during a Corpus Christi convenience store robbery in 2004.
Director Smriti Mundhra discovered Ramirez’s story through journalist Keri Blakinger’s reporting for the nonprofit news organization, The Marshall Project.
Blakinger, who is a producer on the documentary, talked to The Barbed Wire about the documentary and her foray into the film business.
“I knew so little about the film industry that I just had no idea what to expect going into this,” she wrote in an email. “But it is wild now to see the film shortlisted. I think it’s particularly thrilling with this project because I feel like we asked so much of our sources. Everyone on screen — and several people who didn’t even appear in the final cuts — put in so much time and effort and emotional risk to help us make this film.”
That’s especially true of the victim’s son, Aaron Castro, who in the film appears torn between wanting justice for his murdered father and feeling pulled to forgive an unforgivable deed.
“They let us in on some of the hardest moments in their lives,” Blakinger said. “And it’s wonderful to see that recognized because we couldn’t have made this without them.”
Blakinger started writing about Ramirez in 2021, after he made an unusual request: He asked a Texas prison official if she could be the reporter who witnessed his execution. To be clear, Blakinger’s reporting on the death penalty, incarcerated populations, and criminal justice is renowned. She was a 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalist for her “insightful, humane portrait, reported with great difficulty, of men on Death Row in Texas,” she won a National Magazine Award for her coverage of women in jail in 2019, and her memoir, “Corrections in Ink” documented her own journey from prison to newsrooms. This has made her highly sought after by incarcerated folks with stories to tell.
Under the prison system’s rules, since she wasn’t a reporter local to the jurisdiction of the crime, that request was declined.
But the ask, from a man she didn’t know and had never written about, piqued her interest, so she scheduled a trip to Huntsville for an in-person interview.
“From that visit, I ended up writing two stories. One touched on a legal issue in the Ramirez case, and the other was a feature about a death row radio station,” she said. The latter caught the eye of Mundhra, who Blakinger called “a fabulously talented director.”
Mundra was already known for directing the Oscar-nominated 2019 documentary “St. Louis Superman,” about the activist and battle rapper Bruce Franks Jr.
“To be honest, I’d had some bad experiences with film folks in the past so I was a little wary,” Blakinger said. “But Smriti was persistent, and her past work was impressive. So in early 2022 we started work on the film.”
For about two years, they interviewed Ramirez and traveled to South Texas to talk to his supporters, his pastor, his son and the district attorney of Nueces County, who is against the death penalty and worked to try and spare Ramirez’s life.
“I knew that one of the things that attracted me to this case was the opportunity to explore the idea of redemption in a case where the condemned is unequivocally guilty,” Blakinger said. “A disproportionate amount of death row coverage focuses on innocence cases, even though I think cases where the condemned is guilty raise much more nuanced moral quandaries.”
It was Aaron Castro, though, who stands out in the documentary. We see him work out his feelings in real time as Ramirez meets his fate.
“For months, (Castro) was on the fence about whether to participate, and in the end he did — and I’m so grateful for that,” Blakinger said. “It gave us the chance to interrogate the death penalty’s promise of closure in a way I’ve never been able to in print.”
Ramirez’s case garnered national attention after Texas initially denied his request for his pastor to pray over him during the execution.
That prompted a religious liberties case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with Ramirez and found that Texas had violated his rights by denying the pastor’s presence. His pastor was alongside Ramirez in the death chamber when Ramirez was executed.
The documentary came as Texas’ death row was back in the national spotlight in 2024 — and likely will be again in 2025.
Over the last few months, lawmakers, scientists, and celebrities have called for clemency for death row inmate Robert Roberson, who was convicted in 2003 of shaking his 2-year-old daughter to death. His conviction was based on the “shaken baby syndrome” hypothesis, which has since been called into question and has led to international attention.
Dozens of lawmakers, both Republican and Democratic, have tried to stop Roberson’s execution, which was set for last fall, but has since stalled amid wrangling between legistors and the state Attorney General’s Office. Myriad appeals courts, criminal justice bodies, boards, lawmakers, and judges, have been asked to weigh in on the case.
There are also long standing issues with how the death penalty is disproportionately applied to people of color in Texas, especially Black people. While 12% of the state’s residents are Black, 45% of death row inmates are Black. And four of five Texas men executed last year were Black or Latino.
The year John Ramirez was executed, Texas put to death five men and two of them were people of color. As Blakinger put it, “That was kind of an anomaly.”
Nationally, even as the death penalty dies out and there are fewer and fewer people on death rows across the country, a much larger portion of them are people of color — about 58% now, versus 49% in 1990, she said.
“This wasn’t something we tackled in the film, but I think about it a lot because in some ways it’s counterintuitive,” said Blakinger. “American society seems a lot more attuned to disparities in the criminal justice system than it used to be… but they’ve become more pronounced anyway.”