Radio Times: Review by:; Alison Graham

Trevor McDonald’s sparse interviewing technique, mainly because it is so incongruously polite that it throws the prosaic horrors of capital punishment into stark relief.

Concluding his visit to Indiana State Prison, McDonald is led into
the death chamber, where the condemned spend their final hours before the lethal injection.

Later, he interviews a prisoner who slit the throats of a woman and her four-year-old daughter. “I do deserve to be executed,” says the killer during a riveting ten minutes where McDonald, a kindly stranger, just lets him talk.

About this programme

2/2. Part two of two. The broadcaster interviews Fredrick Baer, who has been on death row at Indiana State Prison for seven years following his conviction for the murders of a woman and her four-year-old daughter. Baer talks about his abusive childhood and explains what led him to a life of crime, before Trevor visits the chamber where the condemned man will one day be executed. There's also an insight into the more privileged part of the facility, where inmates stay in a dormitory with cubicles instead of cells. There, he talks to John Serwatka, who was paid to kill two innocent strangers and will never be released.