Smriti Mundhra had no desire to make an anti–death penalty film when she began looking into the story of John Henry Ramirez, a convicted murderer on Texas’s death row. Mundhra, a Los Angeles TV and film creator, wasn’t an activist, and Ramirez wasn’t innocent. There was no doubt that, back on July 14, 2004, Ramirez, 20, high on drugs and alcohol, stopped at a Corpus Christi convenience store to rob it—and found clerk Pablo Castro, 45 and a father of nine, taking out the trash. Ramirez attacked Castro, stabbed him 29 times, and walked off with $1.25. He fled to Mexico and was caught, put on trial in Texas, and sentenced to death.
When Mundhra finally met Ramirez, in 2022—through the window of one of the visiting cubicles at death row in Livingston—he was ready to die. He didn’t want to be executed, but he knew what he had done was horribly wrong. What he wanted from God was forgiveness; from his fellow humans, he just wanted some recognition that he had changed. He wasn’t the same person who had brutally murdered Castro in 2004, he told her.
Mundhra was intrigued. She began filming—and didn’t stop after Ramirez was executed, on October 5, 2022, spending eighteen months interviewing and then editing. The resulting documentary, I Am Ready, Warden, premieres Friday on Paramount+. The film, which takes its title from Ramirez’s final words, is a brilliant, emotional look at the devastating effect of a crime and its punishment on the unfortunate human beings involved—the best film about the death penalty since Errol Morris’s award-winning 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line. The two films couldn’t be more different. Morris’s is feature-length, while Mundhra’s is a short—37 minutes long. The subject of The Thin Blue Line is Randall Dale Adams, an innocent man wrongly convicted of murder, while Ramirez is dead to rights. While The Thin Blue Line uses reenactments and arty close-ups of objects such as clocks and a tape recorder to re-create the murder and the flawed investigation, Mundhra does something much more difficult. She gets her subjects—a murderer, his son, and his victim’s son—to reveal themselves at their most fragile moments, when they are confronting death, redemption, and the appetite for vengeance. Then she puts everything together in a way that makes the viewer confront those subjects too. Do we really believe in forgiveness, Mundhra wants to know, or is it just something we like to talk about? Are we really defined by the very worst things we did in our lives?
“I’m asking a lot of the viewer,” Mundhra told me. “I wanted to force the audience to look at a person who made a grave mistake, who is saying he is regretful for what he did—understands the impact that he had, talks about having changed—and decide for themselves if it’s going to help anything if this person dies.”
Mundhra came to the story by reading Keri Blakinger’s reporting on Ramirez for The Marshall Project in 2021. By that point, Ramirez had become somewhat infamous for putting a brief halt to executions in Texas. Earlier that year, he had filed prison grievances asking that his spiritual adviser, Dana Moore, a pastor at Second Baptist Church in Corpus Christi, be allowed to be by his side at his execution—and that Moore be allowed to lay hands on him as he died. The State of Texas said no, Ramirez appealed, and on the night of his scheduled September 8, 2021, execution, the Supreme Court granted him a stay so it could look into the issue. His actions led to other inmates doing the same, and for six months, Texas had a de facto moratorium on executions. Ramirez eventually won his battle, in early 2022, when the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, but lost the war, when his execution was set for October 5.
None of those issues—the request to lay on hands, the legal jockeying, the Supreme Court decision—are in the film. Those were dots to be connected, Mundhra thought, in a movie made by an activist. She had other things in mind. She just had to convince the main characters to talk to her.
Ramirez was game. Blakinger had interviewed him several times, and she and Mundhra did a couple more interviews. (Blakinger would become a producer on the film.) Behind the glass, Ramirez was a fat, friendly face—soft-spoken and thoughtful. He had been terribly abused as a child—his father abandoned the family early; his mother beat him, once splitting his head open; and he got into drugs and gangs. Ramirez was careful to say that plenty of others had also had bad childhoods, but they didn’t become killers. Mundhra was struck by the difference between Ramirez then and now. “He seemed to me someone who really struggled with the impact of what he did and the desire for redemption and the feeling that he didn’t deserve it. That tension was present throughout the time that I got to know him—and it only escalated as it came to the end. He wanted somebody somewhere to know that he wasn’t just a murderer, that he was a person who had compassion and remorse and love in his heart. He wanted some validation that his life mattered in some way.”
But Mundhra knew the film would depend on the words of two sons. Israel, or Izzy, is Ramirez’s son, born when the killer was on the lam in Mexico. He’s a shy kid with a buzz cut and glasses. In the doc, Ramirez says Izzy is “a real square kid, and I’m so grateful for that.” Mundhra and her small crew got to know Izzy and his mother, spending so much time with them that the teen felt comfortable with them filming—even during his most vulnerable moments.
Aaron Castro was fourteen when his father was killed. Castro was wary of Mundhra at first; was she going to make a movie painting him as a bitter victim? Their first conversation lasted four hours, but it took months for her to convince him to go on camera. “Aaron seeking justice and closure doesn’t make him bloodthirsty,” Mundhra said, “and it doesn’t make him pro–death penalty. It makes him somebody who experienced a traumatic event. His father was killed, and he wanted justice for his father.”
Early on, not long after Ramirez’s capture, we see and hear Castro, still a teenager, say in a TV interview, with the certainty of youth, “You have taken a life. Yours is now on the line.” When we see him again, he’s a grown man, and he’s still seeking justice. “John Henry Ramirez viciously murdered my father,” he says, looking at a crime scene photo of his father lying in his own blood in the parking lot, “and he should pay for what he did.” (Mundhra goes out of her way to constantly remind the viewer of the horror of the crime.)
But Castro’s face on-screen often betrays tension, as if something is warring inside him. “He’s a very kind person,” said Mundhra. “He has an instinct toward forgiveness. But in his mind he also has the sort of counter-weighing need for justice and closure—and those two things were in constant conflict with each other.”
She found other indelible characters too, such as Jan Trujillo, an elderly member of Second Baptist Church who was a death penalty supporter until she met Ramirez back in the 2010s. Trujillo spent a lot of time with him and eventually became his godmother because everyone else in his family had abandoned him. She wrote a letter to Governor Gregg Abbott asking that he commute the death sentence to life in prison without parole so Ramirez could be a field minister in prison. Her point was simple: “He is just not that person he was.” People change, and we should acknowledge that.
And Mundhra found an unlikely anti–death penalty voice: Mark Gonzalez, the district attorney of Nueces County, the office that originally prosecuted Ramirez and sent him to death row. Gonzalez had also been a supporter of capital punishment, but in looking over the Ramirez case, he became so opposed to it that, according to the film, he tried something no DA had ever done in Texas history—to get the courts to withdraw the death warrant because, he said, “the death penalty is unethical.” It didn’t work.
Mundhra knows how to build a narrative. (Her 2019 short documentary, St. Louis Superman, about a rapper and Ferguson, Missouri, activist turned politician, was nominated for an Academy Award.) In I Am Ready, Warden, the viewer is quietly rushed along to execution day as all the characters grapple with the question: Is executing Ramirez the best thing to do? The protesters gathering outside the Walls Unit, in Huntsville, don’t think so. Of course, neither does Izzy. Late in the afternoon in a Huntsville hotel room, the boy has a final, heartbreaking phone call with his father before Ramirez is taken to the death chamber. Sitting on a hotel bed, talking into his cellphone, Izzy looks miserable, anxious, terrified. We can hear his father’s voice on speaker.
“Just know I’ll always be there for you, mijo,” Ramirez says. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
Izzy is crying quietly, his head down, holding up the phone.
“I love you, Izzy. It’s been good, man. Thank you for being in my life and letting me be in your life.”
“I love you,” his son answers. “Thank you for everything.”
“All right, mijo. Bye, I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“Bye.”
Izzy hangs up, puts down the phone, wipes his eyes.
The focus shifts to Castro, who has been preparing for this moment for eighteen years. He’s been cheated before—between 2017 and 2021, Ramirez received three stays of execution. So when, on camera, he hears a radio announcer say that Ramirez is dead, he looks unprepared. Castro peers into the middle distance, a harsh look on his face. “That is . . .” he says and looks up, then scratches his chin. “Hmm.” He lets out a couple of deep breaths. He looks confused. The camera stays on him for more than a minute as his face goes through various moods—contemplative, searching, baffled. He stands outside in the gathering dark of dusk. “John Henry Ramirez is dead,” he says. “Do you know how weird that sounds?” He’s crying. “But a life was lost today. A life was taken.” He looks stricken, lost himself. “Too soon.” He closes his eyes, tears on his face. “Just as it was when I was fourteen years old. And I’m not celebrating. This isn’t a moment to celebrate.” His whole adult life, he has sought vengeance, believing it would bring justice—and closure. Instead, he is reeling.
Near the end of The Thin Blue Line, the actual killer makes a remarkable offhand confession that changes the tone of the movie. There’s a surprise near the end of I Am Ready, Warden too, one that comes after Castro hears a final message recorded by Ramirez hours before he died. In it, the inmate apologizes to Castro by name and says he hopes Castro finds healing through his death. Castro’s reaction (which I won’t reveal) is absolutely wrenching—and absolutely human. It leaves little doubt that the son found no comfort in the execution of his father’s killer.
Mundhra didn’t set out to make an anti–death penalty film, but she knows how to make movies—and she knows how to make someone comfortable enough in front of the camera to reveal the truth about what is going on in their heart. Follow Castro’s face as he realizes he will never get the closure he was promised. Watch Izzy’s eyes as he says goodbye to his doomed father. Listen to Trujillo’s voice after the execution as she weeps for the child of God who was not the same person as the one who committed that horrible murder.
“All y’all that know me know I made the most changes I could,” says Ramirez, appearing on a video screen at a memorial service near the end of the film. “I bettered myself as much as I could—hopefully that’s enough.”
Maybe for God. But not for Texas.
