The short documentary I Am Ready, Warden produced by former Sun staff writer and magazine editor Keri Blakinger ’14, has been nominated for an Oscar. The documentary follows the Texas death row prisoner John Henry Ramirez through the days leading up to his execution. The film provides the perspective of Ramirez, his son and the victim’s son as they grapple with the reality of capital punishment.
July 19th, 2004, Corpus Christi, Texas. While working the night shift, Pablo Castro was stabbed to death by John Henry Ramirez right outside the Times Market convenience store. I Am Ready, Warden is not a story looking to prove the innocence of Ramirez. Instead, it’s about his guilt and accepting his reality. Most of all, it’s the different stories throughout the film that make it so powerful. We see the victim’s son want vengeance for his father and try to find it through the death penalty. But we also see Ramirez’s son say goodbye to his father for the last time.
Keri Blakinger ’14 has been writing for the Los Angeles Times since 2023. She covers criminal justice and the Los Angeles Police. She wrote a piece on John Henry Ramirez in 2021 and what death row prisoners can request before they die. Ramirez’s story was brought to the screen by Director Smriti Mundhra and Keri Blakinger as a producer in I Am Ready, Warden.
I got the chance to speak with Keri about her involvement with the film and the story of John Henry Ramirez.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sophia Romanov Imber: What was it like to bring this story you wrote and the interviews you had with John Ramirez, to the screen as a documentary?
Keri Blakinger: Oh man, there are so many ways to answer that. With a lot of reporting, I would go into it typically having some sense of what the story looks like. You have an outline or you have a better sense of where the reporting ends in a lot of cases, but when you're doing the sort of reporting for a documentary, you're intending to watch things unfold in front of you. The story changes as you're telling it. That means you have a different sort of thinking and structuring process.
But also there are all these things, moments, that I’m not accustomed to thinking about needing to capture. Whether it’s B-roll or even anticipating the amount of time that we need to spend with someone to get a given moment on camera. It’s just not the same with words. Like, if somebody is going to tell me something amazing and central to a story, it might be that I've spent three hours with them and I go home and they call me at three in the morning, and that's when I get that moment. But you can't do that in film, you need to just stay and be there.
The whole flow of how the reporting and filming work is very different. But it was very fulfilling to be able to report this deeply because even with a lot of longer-form written stories that I've done, you still don't spend as much time with as many characters as you do on film. Despite the fact that [the documentary] is 36 minutes, we have hours and hours and hours of footage. We had multiple trips to Corpus Christi for several days. We have characters that we spent an entire two or three days with who never ended up being in the film. We spent a lot of time with people and got to be on the front lines of this whole process from all sides, which is something that I can't do as a single reporter. It was pretty amazing to be able to dig this deeply into personal narratives and people's stories without it being in the scope of a year-long investigative project.
Romanov Imber: And you wrote the story about the prison radio channel and the legality of John's pastor being with him during the execution. Did you still want those parts to make it into the film or was the main focus of the documentary to spend more time with the people and their narratives?
Blakinger: I started paying attention to John because I had been interviewing another guy on death row, and the prison spokesman pulled me aside and said, “Hey, John Ramirez has asked if you can be the reporter who witnesses his execution.” That was a very unusual request. I'd witnessed executions, but never because someone requested that I do so. And I was intrigued by that, even though I didn't qualify under the prison rules at that time to be the person to witness that particular execution. So, I put in an immediate request to interview him. I think I interviewed him the next week, and that was the week before he had a scheduled execution date.
From that interview, I wrote a first story about what last choices death row prisoners can make, last words and last rights. And I also wrote the death row radio story. Those were based on one-hour in-person interviews with John. Then after that Smriti [Mundhra] read the death row radio story and was interested in doing something off of that, and we ended up focusing on John.
Initially, the interest had been in John as a redemption story, or as a story about our capacity for forgiveness and redemption, because unlike a lot of the stories that people tell about death row, this was not a case of innocence. This was someone who admitted that he was guilty, and when you accept that the person is guilty, that opens up the door to talk about other things like forgiveness and redemption. Given that this was someone whose faith had become such a central part of him, his story and his litigation, this seemed like a really good case to focus on and explore redemption.
And we initially were focused on him and his family, his pastor and his religious community. We'd also reached out to the victim's family, but since they hadn't spoken much publicly, we didn't have any sense of what they would say or whether they would participate. Certainly, we had no inkling that [the victim’s son, Aaron] would become so central to the point of the film. He agreed to be in the film, and then that's how we end up getting some of the amazing footage of him in the moments after the execution, sitting with his immediate reaction to it. This ended up allowing us to create a film that explored whether the death penalty actually provides closure in the way that we are often told that it does.
That’s one of the differences with film. You're watching the events unfold and the story can change as you're reporting it. That's a key example of that because we had set out to tell a story that was focused on redemption and forgiveness, and that is still a key tenet of it, but it also became a film that explores whether the death penalty really fulfills its promise of closure to victims' families.
RomanovImber: That moment after Aaron realizes John was executed, it was a very long pause and I didn’t even know what to do with it. [Aaron’s] perspective became so prominent and it was really interesting to watch unfold.
Blakinger: Yeah, I mean that was an amazing moment that we were lucky to be able to capture.
RomanovImber: It was very interesting to hear him say, “I'm confused right now, I'm not really sure what to do.”
Blakinger: That's a point in the film where a lot of audiences laugh and I don't know if it's like nervous or relief, but it's like one moment when there tends to be an audible reaction from audiences. I've screened this a number of times now and that's the only point where people like sort of consistently audibly react.
RomanovImber: Because you kind of share his confusion for a moment, you're like, “Oh, I'm not really sure what I would do either.”
Blakinger: Right, I think that is why people react that way.
RomanovImber: Do you think the film accomplished all of the perspectives, or what was your intention in the film to get people talking about it after seeing it?
Blakinger: I don't think any film can encompass every perspective. There are family members in both families who either didn't talk to us or didn't talk to us on camera. But I think that what [the film] did is provide a look at a perspective that is not represented widely in the media. There's a sort of specific narrative put forth, an assumption that the death penalty provides closure. That's not what we set out to do, but I'm very happy that we got to raise those questions and present them to an audience.
RomanovImber: When you talk about creating an impact and how I Am Ready, Warden was presented to an audience and you got to see all these reactions during the screenings, what to you is the most fulfilling reaction or how do you know that you made that impact?
Blakinger: I think for me it's always hearing how the sources and subjects react. The people who have trusted you with their stories, that you’ve spent a lot of time with, I think their reactions are always the ones that are the most fulfilling or that matter the most to me.
I Am Ready, Warden is available to watch on Paramount+.
Sophia Romanov Imber is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be reached at sromanovimber@cornellsun.com.
