About to be electrocuted for a catalog of heinous crimes, the unrepentant Horace Pinker transforms into a terrifying energy source. Only young athlete Jonathan Parker, with an uncanny connection to him through bizarre dreams, can fight the powerful demon.
An LA police officer is murdered in the onion fields outside of Bakersfield. However, legal loopholes could keep his kidnappers from receiving justice, and his partner is haunted by overwhelming survivor's guilt.
Disgusted with the policies of King Charles I, Oliver Cromwell plans to take his family to the New World. But on the eve of their departure, Cromwell is drawn into the tangled web of religion and politics that will result in the English Civil War.
Following in his father's footsteps, Albert Pierrepoint becomes one of Britain's most prolific executioners, hiding his identity as a grocery deliveryman. But when his ambition to be the best inadvertently exposes his gruesome secret, he becomes a minor celebrity & faces a public outcry against the practice of hanging. Based on true events.
A newspaper publisher, wanting to prove a point about the insufficiency of circumstantial evidence, talks his possible son-in-law Tom into a hoax in an attempt to expose ineptitude of the city's hard-line district attorney. The plan is to have Tom plant clues leading to his arrest for killing a female nightclub dancer. Once Tom is found guilty, he is to reveal the setup and humiliate the DA.
Ruth Ellis lives with her ten-year old son Andy next to a night club. One night she meets David Blakely, and they start a love affair. However, for David with his upper-class background, it is impossible to uphold the relationship. He breaks up with her, something which makes Ellis, obsessed by him, very upset.
In this fact-based made-for TV film, Gary Gilmore, an Indiana man who just finished serving a lengthy stay in prison, tries to start anew by moving to Utah. Before long, Gary begins an ill-advised romance with the troubled Nicole Baker, a teenage single mother. As their relationship quickly deteriorates, Gary goes on a murderous rampage, leaving two dead. During his trial, he demands capital punishment; a media circus ensues and outsiders look to profit from his story.
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.
A freestyle biopic of Ikki Kita, the ultranationalist intellectual whose ideas inspired the failed military coup in 1936.
In 1747, a handsome but rebellious Scotsman named Richard Abdee is auctioned off as a slave on a Caribbean island controlled by French and British sugar-planters. When caught having sex with his owner's wife, Abdee is given 100 lashes with the dreaded "dragonard" whip. This sentence is meant to be fatal but Abdee survives and later joins in a slave revolt which puts an end to the island's era of savage whippings.
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.
In 1950s England, slow-witted Derek Bentley falls in with a group of petty criminals led by Chris Craig, a teenager with a fondness for American gangster films. Chris and Derek's friendship leads to their involvement in the true case which would forever shake England's belief in capital punishment.
Based on a true story, James Coburn portrays a military lawyer assigned to defend a confessed psychotic killer. Set in the context of WWII and the uneasy US-Australian military alliance. The accused killer claims to have killed 3 women in order to possess their voices. Despite the defense lawyer's concerns that the killer is not fit to stand trial, the US military presses forward with the case and its desire to have the killer executed in order to strengthen the shaky alliance.
Liberal district attorney decides to seek the death penalty for a man who slaughtered a family at Christmastime, then drank their blood. He escapes, though, and starts killing again.
A crusading reporter plans his own arrest and conviction for first degree murder, trying to show that the death sentence should be outlawed when based on circumstantial evidence alone, but his plan goes awry.
When a brilliant crime writer investigates a 40-year-old murder, he confronts a small town's worst fears.
A hugely successful DA goes into private practice after sending a man to the chair -- only to find out later he was innocent. Now the drunken attorney only seems to represent criminals and low lifes.
When a teenager from a political family in the Philippines is accused of a double murder, the country’s entire judicial system is put to the test after years of alleged corruption.
Thomas Crimmins is a new warder, or guard, in an Irish prison. He is young, naive, and idealistic, determined to serve his country by his part in meting out justice to criminals. His superior, Regan, however, realizes that even prisoners are human beings, and Regan is sick of the eye-for-an-eye attitude that leads the state to execute condemned men, or "quare fellows." Crimmins begins to see that not all is black and white in his new world, and when he becomes involved with Kathleen, the wife of one of the condemned men, his attitude begins to change. When new evidence arises to suggest that Kathleen's husband may not deserve his fate, Crimmins is torn between his duty and his humanity.
A condemned murderer, in the process of being executed, relives the events that led to his being sentenced to die in the electric chair. Told in flashback, we witness a sleazy dancehall girl (Vivienne Osborne) dupe a high rise riveter (Edward G. Robinson) into marriage so she can live off of him. But when he loses his job and his marbles, she ends up supporting him with money from her side man--and misses no opportunity to rub it in his face that she's now supporting him in his emasculated state. As the animosity grows and things get more and more unbearable, he is eventually driven to desperate measures.