In 2013, Trevor McDonald presented Inside Death Row, a harrowing, award-winning documentary in which he interviewed men locked up in Indiana’s state prison, particularly men who were waiting for their “date and time”, as they put it – the date and time they would be executed for their crimes. He found the experience of making it so difficult to shake that he told the Radio Times he would “never, ever do another prison series”. But something changed his mind, and Death Row 2018 with Trevor McDonald (ITV) brings him back to the same place, and many of the men, five years later.
The timing is crucial. A number of death-penalty states are engaged in an ongoing and emotionally charged debate about lifelong incarceration and the death sentence itself. McDonald tours a brand new execution chamber, shiny white and fresh, with features his host describes blithely as “nice” – separate viewing rooms for family of the victims and family of the prisoner. But many companies will no longer sell their drugs to Indiana for the purposes of execution; they do not consider it to be a “medical practice”. Nobody has been put to death in eight years.
There are plenty of men still waiting in line, however. McDonald meets two of his former subjects and there’s ample footage from the original documentary to offer side-by-side comparison of what five years of waiting to die looks like. Ben Ritchie, who shot and killed a police officer, has a dry sense of humour about it. Fredrick Baer, who killed a mother and her four-year-old daughter after breaking into their house, will be isolated for as long as he lives, owing to near constant attacks from inmates. There is, it seems, a scale of murder, even among murderers.
McDonald’s interview with Baer is particularly grim – he admits that, even though he personally opposes the death penalty, Baer’s crime makes him understand why people call for it. Also haunting is an extraordinary conversation with William Gibson, a convicted serial killer who has never given an interview about his crimes. Gibson has been sentenced to death for the murder of three women, but admits that the authorities probably only know about a tenth of what he’s done. “I don’t believe I got any of that,” he shrugs, when McDonald questions his humanity. He giggles when he recalls what he did. It is utterly chilling.
As distressing, though in a cooler light, is an interview with Paul McManus, who murdered his wife and two children on the night she asked him for a divorce. His death sentence was commuted, but he wishes it had not been. He seems to be saying that he felt at peace with the finality of the judgment he was given in the first place. Life without the possibility of parole is worse, he says. Whether that brings comfort or more pain to the families of those he killed is another matter.
You know what you’re getting with a Trevor McDonald documentary. He offers clear-eyed detachment, and, though his own views simmer underneath the surface, he rarely lets them into the narrative. While Louis Theroux, who covers similar ground, is warm and relatable, McDonald is precise and earns trust through his authority; it’s a more old-fashioned journalistic approach. But that’s not to say it lacks emotion. His time with 72-year-old barber Rick, a one-time armed robber who has lost all hope of ever being released, is deeply affecting, as is the conversation he has with Ronald L Sanford’s mother, Pamela. Sanford was given a 170-year sentence at the age of 15 for a horrific double murder he committed when he was 13; McDonald digs into their relationship for the only real sliver of redemption here.
This is a delicately balanced documentary. In McDonald’s interpretation, there is deep respect for the victims of these terrible crimes, and also a lingering question about the point of vengeance without any prospect of rehabilitation, about punishments that can seem arbitrary, and dependent on time, place and circumstance. In his closing voiceover, McDonald talks of remembering “wasted lives and grievous deeds”. He says that, once again, the people he has met here will remain with him. Perhaps this is the last time he’ll ever do a prison series. But perhaps there will be more.
