I Am A Killer

Netflix, 2018, 10 50 minute episodes.

Produced in collaboration with A+E Networks U.K. and Sky Vision Productions

Produced by Tom Adams and Kathy Hale

James “Chicken Head” Robinson killed Frank Hart. There is no dispute about that. He told the authorities that he did it deliberately, and with forethought, because he wanted to go to death row.

Was he insane? Not in the eyes of the law, which limits the definition of sanity to determining if the accused knew his actions were wrong or not. Robinson cheerfully agrees that murdering someone is wrong, which means in the view of the state of Florida, he’s sane.

He had to go through five defense attorneys before he found one willing to plead in favor of the death penalty for his client.

So, in December of 2008, a court sentenced him to death, and he’s been on death row ever since. He’s pretty happy about that. What could possibly be saner than that?

“Means To An End,” the story of James Robinson, is the first of ten episodes in a chilling new Netflix docuseries, I Am A Killer. Each episode includes fairly lengthy interviews with the 10 subjects (including Justin Dickens, one of the interviewees, before he became a killer), all of whom admit their crimes (although one says he doesn’t remember it), along with interviews with attorneys and any family and friends the inmates may have.

Robinson’s story is a familiar one right up until he enters adult prison. Parents were druggies and provided little or nothing in the way of parenting. He started with petty crimes (bicycle theft) at age 12, and it escalated to violence by the time he was fifteen. But the time he was 17, his rap sheet, including violent crimes in juvenile prison, was so long that the court threw its hands up in the air and sentenced him to adult prison for twenty years. He had only been in for a week or so before he attacked a guard and wound up in Close Management ( https://www.flrules.org/gateway/RuleNo.asp?ID=33-601.800 ) which isn’t exactly the same as solitary confinement but is close enough for never-mind. He spent the next twenty years nearly unbroken in Close Management, unable to go five weeks without a major rule infraction. Nor was this just a case of the jailers messing with him; he cheerfully admits that he deserved every minute alone in a cell, 23 hours a day, for twenty years.

Still sane here, boss!

He realized that death row was a lot nicer place to be, provided, of course, that you didn’t mind being on death row to begin with.

So, using cold calculation, he picked Frank Hurt, a scrawny little pedophile who nobody liked or cared much about, and killed him. And asked to be sentenced to death for it.

He’s still on death row. It’s amazing that the secretive and paranoid prison system allowed him (and nine others) to be interviewed, but he was, and now it’s on Netflix.

The scariest thing about Robinson is that he’s pleasant, engaging, articulate and friendly. You might have to be around him for a while before realizing there is something very drastically wrong with this man. That makes him as terrifying as Hannibal Lector.

This is just the first episode of I Am a Killer, and it’s terrifying. The rest should be just as disturbing—and just as important. It may shake your own thoughts on sanity.