If true, Barnes had played an oddly unimaginative game with the police, who raided his home in 1988 only to find his wife's body in the wardrobe. Seven years into his original life sentence he had converted to Islam and, during Ramadan, he'd decided to try to atone by confessing to an older murder of a former girlfriend, whom he'd bludgeoned to death with a hammer. He was subsequently sentenced to death. Herzog went to lengths to expose Barnes's human side, including meeting his family members and uncovering a tragic history of child abuse. Barnes appeared calm, cleanly presented, wore his spectacles folded into the collar of his orange prison jumpsuit, and interviewed poetically. He held back tears at the right moments, opened up about his dreams of submerging himself in fresh water so that he could "wash off the filth," and even said he loves the rain, misses the feel of it on his face, and likes to "hear it beat on the roof." The trouble with each of the cases in this series is that they mostly centre on the interviewees. What can we really know in 45 minutes about these cases, as told primarily by the criminals themselves? As Herzog says, Barnes has committed a "definitively evil" crime, but he "does not appear to be a monster." Is he being played? Are we? The stories are designed to make us suspend our judgment of these men, which we do. But for what cause? If capital punishment is an urgent subject, it doesn't come across as one. And if it's not, why is Herzog there? As opposed to chasing the harmless eccentrics such as those who escape to the wild to befriend wild bears, as he did in his heartbreaking 2005 documentary Grizzly Man. Most problematic of all is that Death Row makes good television. These men have been deliberately chosen for their violent histories as well as their characterful ability to tell their story to us in an emotive and entertaining way. Whether they deserve that or not is another matter.