When the end credits rolled on I Am Ready, Warden at the Austin Short Film Festival, the entire audience seemed to exhale in unison. The short documentary, now streaming on Paramount+, chronicles the days leading up to the execution of John Henry Ramirez, a 38-year-old killed by the state in 2022. It’s a difficult watch, but a worthwhile one for people on any side of the death penalty debate.
This documentary packs more raw emotion and uncomfortable truths into 36 minutes than others do with twice that time. It shows the people affected most by capital punishment in striking close-up, giving voice to their complicated thoughts and views.
Ramirez was sent to death row for the 2004 murder of Pablo Castro outside of a gas station in Corpus Christi. An attempted robbery turned into a fight, which ended with Ramirez fatally stabbing Castro, who had a teenage son. Ramirez fled to Mexico that same night, and he remained on the run before being captured in 2008 and eventually sentenced.
The film’s director Smriti Mundhra told the Texas Observer she wanted to make a documentary that “tested our capacity for forgiveness and a person’s capacity for redemption.” Her work achieves this by highlighting the tension between one man’s remorse and another’s deeply passionate desire for justice. The central conflict is put into words by the victim’s son, Aaron Castro, in archival news footage, which is reprised throughout the documentary: “You have taken a life. Yours is now on the line.”
The subjects’ trust in the filmmakers is evident—Ramirez and Aaron Castro both separately participate in the film, as does Nueces County District Attorney Mark Gonzales, Ramirez’s godmother Jan Trujillo, and his teenage son Israel. The viewer gets to be in the room with these people during their most vulnerable moments, a level of intimacy—bordering on feeling intrusive—that forces the audience to feel the full force of the grief and catharsis.
This documentary does not fly by, despite its short run-time. It’s made up of unflinching, unhurried emotional scenes: Castro processing the moment he learns Ramirez has been executed, the final phone call between Ramirez and his son, the open casket at his funeral.
Texas has the largest death penalty machine in the United States, executing 591 people since 1982. With each scheduled execution, decisionmakers—which include the Court of Criminal Appeals, the Board of Pardons and Paroles, and the governor—are bombarded with arguments for and against the state-sanctioned killing. There are legal appeals, clemency requests, and moral arguments lobbied by those who want to halt the execution and those for whom the execution is the ultimate form of justice. But mercy for those scheduled to die is rare in Texas.
Ramirez doesn’t get any official reprieve. This is a forgone conclusion for viewers, as his execution took place two years ago. But the film offers a chance at some form of deliverance—this time it’s up to the viewer, not the politicians or courts, to decide.
In Ramirez’s case, there was no doubt about his guilt. He was indeed the man who stabbed Castro to death outside a gas station in Corpus Christi. The viewer is asked to balance this knowledge with new things they learn about him: his troubled childhood, his remorse, his relationship with his son. At the same time, the traumatic effects of Ramirez’s crime on the victim’s family are reemphasized throughout the film. The tension between these stories forms taut emotional strings, which, when plucked, are discordant, unresolved. But that discomfort is the whole point.
I Am Ready, Warden trusts the viewer with a nuanced look at both the human costs of death row and the violent crimes that bring people there.
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