22 February 2025 :
FEBRUARY 21, 2025 - Texas. Keri Blakinger Receives Oscar Nomination for Death Row Inmate Documentary
Keri Blakinger’s work documenting the lives of death row inmates earned her the title of 2024 Pulitzer Prize Finalist. Now, she can add an Oscar nomination to her roster.
The former Sun staff writer and current Los Angeles Times staff writer helped produce the death row documentary I Am Ready, Warden and was named a contender for the Best Documentary Short Film Oscar on Jan. 23. The documentary is based on the story of John Ramirez, an inmate who was executed at the Huntsville, Texas state penitentiary on Oct. 4, 2022.
The film came out of her journalistic work featuring death row inmates, including the 2023 article “Dungeons & Dragons Players of Death Row.” The article was written for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit newsroom reporting on the U.S. criminal justice system, and featured in The New York Times Magazine.
Blakinger first became entangled with Ramirez when a prison spokesman pulled her aside during a reporting outing. He informed her that Ramirez requested she view his execution.
She found it an “unusual request.” Blakinger did not know who Ramirez was before then. “I’ve witnessed executions, but never because someone requested that I do so,” she said.
From there, Blakinger began interviewing Ramirez to get to know him. She published several articles inspired by him in his final days. One article, “The Prisoner-Run Radio Station That’s Reaching Men on Death Row,” caught the eye of American filmmaker Smriti Mundhra. Mundhra and Blakinger decided to collaborate and bring Ramirez’s story to film.
Mundhra and Blakinger initially intended to focus on the idea of redemption, intrigued by Ramirez’s admission of guilt and conversion to faith during his time on death row. With small hopes, they reached out to the family of Pablo Castro, who Ramirez fatally attacked in the 2004 robbery that brought him to death row.
At the last minute, Aaron Castro, the son of Pablo Castro, agreed to be in the film — a move that would transform the entire focus of the documentary.
“[Watching him] in the moments after the execution, sitting with his immediate reaction to it … 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,” Blakinger said.
Instead of an angle focused solely on Ramirez’s redemption, viewers are left watching Aaron come to terms with the execution of his father’s killer.
Blakinger’s journey through journalism has taken her across the country. Following her graduation from Cornell with a Bachelor of Arts in English, Blakinger began her professional journalism career writing for the Ithaca Times, later moving to the New York Daily News and transferring papers again through a Hearst fellowship that put her on the Houston Chronicle.
At the Houston Chronicle, Blakinger’s work shifted focus to criminal justice — pitches she believes came from her own time in prison after a 2010 drug charge.
Once hired out of the fellowship program, Blakinger officially took on a side beat as a death row reporter for the Houston Chronicle. In the years since her Houston Chronicle hiring, Blakinger’s reporting slowly expanded to covering prisons and specializing more broadly in criminal justice. Blakinger credits landing in Houston with her accidental discovery of her passion for death row reporting.
Blakinger moved from Houston to the Los Angeles Times in January 2023, a year before the film’s initial release in February 2024. She sees her established work as a journalist continuing to take her in various directions, either continuing with more journalism or an entirely new creative endeavor.
As for how Blakinger believes her recent accolades have impacted her career, “It doesn’t change anything in a lot of ways,” she said. “I’m still trying to do the same things, and I’m still trying to tell stories that have [an] impact.”
