Damien Echols, whose real life story inspires Rectify, compared Daniel Holden's reaction to being release to his experience as such: "Another thing McKinnon captures is the shock and trauma of someone just released after nearly 20 years on death row. The main character falls asleep on the ride home from the prison, and then falls asleep again as his sister drives him around to see how the town has changed. When I first walked off of death row I was so deeply in shock and traumatized that for nearly three months I couldn't watch a movie, a television show, read a book, or take a car ride without falling into a deep, dark sleep that didn't seem to refresh me much when I awakened. All I wanted to do was go out and walk the streets of New York City at all hours of the day and night. I would walk until I was so exhausted I'd stumble over my own feet like a drunk - and I was drunk. I was drunk on the river of human energy that flowed all around me, over me, and through me. The human interaction and energy I'd been starved of for almost 20 years."
Rectify's modus operandi is covering about a day in each episode.
Created by one-time Little Rock resident Ray McKinnon, Rectify borrows from real-life incidents, most obvious being the case surrounding The West Memphis Three, a story chronicled in a trio of documentaries: Paradise Lost: The Child Murders At Robin Hood Hills (1996), Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000) and Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011). Three teenagers were tried and convicted of mutilating and murdering three young boys and spent 18 years behind bars before being released because of new DNA evidence. One of the three, Damien Echols, was on Death Row when released. Interestingly, Echols wrote an article in The Huffington Post (titled "Returned From the Land of the Dead", dated 04.19.2013) giving his impressions of Rectify after having seen it before the series aired. He readily admits the connection, calling the show "very realistic". Also the late wife of the writer of the show, Lisa Blount, was a friend of Echols'. She and Echols exchanged letters while he was on death row in Arkansas, and she even sang at a concert in Arkansas, along with Eddie Vedder, Patti Smith, and Johnny Depp, to help raise awareness about his plight.
The name of the protagonist, "Daniel", is a of Hebrew origin and it means, "God is my judge".