Executions are rising in the US. This reverend witnesses them.

About 2,100 people are on death row in America. Some have been there for decades, in part because executions have been on the decline in the US. But that’s changing. So far this year, 41 people have been executed, up from 25 last year, and six more executions are scheduled. 

Early in his second term, President Donald Trump—a longtime proponent of the death penalty—signed an executive order reinstating federal executions while encouraging states to expand the use of capital punishment. One man has seen many of these executions up close. 

The Reverend Jeff Hood is an Old Catholic Church priest, an ordained Baptist minister, a racial justice activist, and something of a go-to spiritual adviser for many currently on death row. Hood often tells people that his job is to become death row inmates’ best friend “so that their best friend will be with them when they’re executed.” On the day of the execution, he goes inside the chamber for the final moments of their lives. This kind of work, he says, is a natural outgrowth of his longtime activism for racial equality and the Black Lives Matter movement.

On this week’s More To The Story, Hood sits down with host Al Letson to describe his work as an advocate for death row inmates, what it’s like being a white Southern reverend vocally advocating for racial justice, and how capital punishment in the US today illustrates American society’s increasing movement in a more violent direction.

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This following interview was edited for length and clarity. More To The Story transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors.

Al Letson: Tell me, Jeff, right now the thing that I am the most curious about is how did Jeff Hood become Jeff Hood?

Jeff Hood: Man, I thought you was going to say, “How do I keep this head shaved?” Man, that’s what you was going to ask. I grew up in South Atlanta and that had a tremendous effect on me growing up. I mean, I was constantly influenced by all of these great civil rights heroes, Andy Young, Joe Lowery. I don’t think you can be around that without it getting in your bones.

Yeah.

I guess as I got older, I looked at Atlanta and I said, “They got enough help.” And so they got a lot of people working up there, and so I needed to go somewhere that was terrible and Little Rock, Arkansas fit the bill.

See, I ain’t going to talk bad about Little Rock like that. I can say some things, but I ain’t going to do it.

I’ll tell you, this is the ultimate nowhere place, which has its pluses and minuses.

When did you join the ministry?

Man, I was a young man. So I grew up in a southern Baptist congregation that was sort of this bastion of white evangelicalism and a world of sort of black middle-class folks on the South side of Atlanta. I always tell people, man, that one of the defining characteristics of where I lived is that a couple streets over, Tiny had her nail shop. So that tells you everything you need to know.

So growing up, we had a very conservative theology, but I was also again, very influenced by the civil rights culture that somehow faith can achieve change and faith can mean more than just sitting in the church praying, that you can actually make the world a better place. I came through my undergrad and was interested in the ministry and I had this mentor that matters so much to me.

I mean, he was in a conservative religious environment, but he was very open-minded, poured into me, encouraged me to think widely and deeply, and I go to seminary and I’m right there in the middle of seminary again preparing for ministry, and I get a phone call from him and he revealed that he had lung cancer.

I go down to Atlanta and he brings me into next to his bedside. They had the hospital bed set up. I mean, just a classic sort of, he was dying with his wife and kids in the next room over. He reveals to me that he had lived his life as a closeted gay man.

Wow.

And he had pastored all of these churches as this-

Wow.

… southern Baptist minister. And so all of a sudden I’m sitting here with this sort of epiphany and it’s like, “I love Jesus, but here’s this person that had really been Jesus to me and poured into me so much, and all of a sudden Jesus is gay.” And that sort of blew up all that theology that I had had prior. And I think that that pushed me deeper into this sort of search. And I felt like if I could push into the liberal and I’ll keep “Liberal.” Now, tell everybody I’m doing my fingers with the liberal in the air quotes.

Yeah.

But I thought I’m going to pour, push into the liberal crowd and see what they can teach me. So I went to Emory. I did a graduate degree there in Atlanta at Emory in theology. And man, I began to find these liberal folks just as backwards as a lot of these conservative folks, I’m going to put up the flag but don’t expect me to march. I had been so influenced by again, those civil rights leaders that I knew I was supposed to go all the way. I was supposed to give my body.

I began to find a lot of the sort of black gay culture in Atlanta and was ready to push into these spaces of injustice in a way that I had never seen before. And so I was so affected by this sort of courage that these folks were showing. I mean, they was going into the black church and saying, “Y’all can talk about social justice all the time, but y’all are treating us like shit.”

And then going into white spaces and saying, “Y’all ain’t just racist, you’re homophobic, you’re transphobic” and on down the line. But I was brought into the ministry in a conservative environment, 22, 23, and then sort of baptized in this sort of queer culture that in many ways led me to this sort of radicalization that continued to come through the years that’s led me to Black Lives Matter work, work in queer liberation and eventually to death row. Most people, they’re their radicalists when they get first ordained. I feel like I-

It seems like you-

I went the opposite direction.

Right. You kept getting more radical after the ordination.

Yeah. And it just seems like now I have a lot of sympathy for a lot of conservatives. And the reason I have sympathy for a lot of conservatives is a lot of the times it feels like a lot of these folks don’t know no better. I don’t have any sympathy for liberal folks. I find liberal Christians to be one of the most disgusting group of people that I have ever encountered because, and apologize for some of the folks who would call themselves liberal out there that’s actually nice people.

But my point is this sort of space in the middle that Dr. King talked about in the letter from the Birmingham Jail, those are the people that are most bothersome to me now. I mean, look, we are in a society right now where we’re getting undocumented folks being pulled out of the houses, drug through the streets, and I hear all the time, “We’ll pray for you.” I don’t need your damn prayers. I need your help. I need you there in the streets with me. I need your bodies. And it’s the same way with these guys on death row. And I encountered churches all the time who say, “Well, we’ll pray for you.”

Yeah.

This guy is about to literally be killed.

Let me ask you, in your trajectory, how did you find yourself working with Black Lives Matter?

I think my gateway, if you will, was when Troy Davis was about to be executed in Georgia. And I was a student at Emory at the time, and I remember Officer Mark MacPhail was the victim in that case out of Savannah. Everybody had on the “I am Troy Davis T-shirts.” That was the swag I guess back then for the moment. And I remember just thinking about that situation and really being so deeply convicted that if Officer Mark MacPhail had been black, then none of this stuff would be happening.

Of course, I was an Obama kid 2008, 2009, and I was a part of this generation that was so determined and dedicated to see this hope and change and looking at the White House and saying, “Everything we’ve hoped for has finally arrived.” And I remember doing that Troy Davis campaign, everybody saying, “Obama’s going to find a way to save him.”

And I remember getting to the night the execution there in Jackson, Georgia. On one side, the phalanxes of troopers and police are lined up. They got all their fancy equipment. And on the other side is all of these students from Atlanta and various activists. And I remember even then people talking about, “Well, Obama’s going to do something.” And I remember that night when he was executed, going home and just being like, “Something has to get more radical, man.”

Do you feel like that was the moment that radicalized you? You had been building up.

Yeah.

And learning all of these things and then Troy Davis happens and it’s just like that was it, that broke the dam open.

I think that my minister coming out to me was something that put me on a different trajectory and caused me to start asking questions. But I do think that that Troy Davis moment was the moment where I said, “Change can’t happen through these venues that everybody tells me it can happen.” I began to realize political change wasn’t going to happen through elections. And that’s not to say that we need to have this violent overthrow of the government, but it is to say that you can’t trust anybody.

I mean, and when you start trusting folks, that’s when you start getting complacent. And in the years that followed, obviously you had incident after incident, shooting after shooting. I went to Ferguson and was there and marched. And the reality is that I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have the language, I didn’t have white guy trying to do right. I mean, I didn’t know anything except that I wanted to be where I felt like Jesus was and I wanted to be where I felt like real hope and real change was. I found it in the streets.

In 2016, you helped organize a rally in Dallas that was in response to the killings of two black men by white police officers. At that protest, five officers were shot and killed. Can you tell me about that? What happened?

It was me and another guy named Dominique Alexander, and we had done a lot of organizing together and I had called him and I said, “Look, we got to do something.” He was like, “Okay, set up the Facebook page.” So I set up an event page and started inviting people. And I remember he was out pocket and I couldn’t get ahold of him. And I remember thinking to myself, “Holy shit, we’re about to have thousands of people in the streets and I’m going to be there by myself.” So we get to the day of, I mean, it was really, really hot.

And by the time I got up there, I remember thinking, man, “If I don’t meet the anger of this crowd, then this is going to be a nasty moment.” Because people were angry, very angry and rightfully so. And so I got up and I said, “God damn white America.” And then I said, “White America is a fucking lie.” And at the time, I mean that shit hit, man. Those were the words that needed to be said, really pushing into this idea that white America, the things that we’re being taught, the history that is being upheld is a lie. That’s not the totality of the American story. It’s not what’s important. What is important is all of us.

Describe for me the scene in Dallas and what was that feeling like?

It was a real feeling of eeriness. It really felt like, here’s a lot of people we don’t know and we don’t know what could happen.

And just to help our listeners remember, is that this was a really tense time in the country. The spotlight was being turned on black people dying at the hands of police. So tension had to be high with everybody, not just with the protesters, but also on the police side as well, because they don’t know what’s coming as well.

And also at the end of the day, this was a situation where we were trying to make it as safe as possible. So you’re protesting the police, but also working with them.

Working with them. Yeah.

We always felt like if something horrific was going to happen, it was going to be the police shooting protesters. We were never prepared for something to come from within. We got all of these people, people of goodwill coming together and then all of a sudden it’s just crushed by this act of violence. We are going down the street. I had an officer right next to me and really good guy, somebody that I had become friends with, he had served as sort of a protection for me and other organizers.

And so I’m going down the street and I’m looking up ahead and I started seeing these shots fired and these officers dropping to the ground and this officer pushes me to the ground and literally ready to give his life for me. And I had a big old six foot cross I was carrying. I was ready to go for the protests, but I wasn’t prepared for those shots. I guess what I’m trying to say is I feel like I’ve become who I am based on the difficulty of trying to be human in this society, trying to figure out a way to let love make a way instead of hate in vengeance.

I think my life has been defined by these conundrums, being a Southerner, having this accent, but at the same time wanting to see a new South. And I think a lot of Southerners experience this in that you’re proud of this civil rights history, you’re ashamed of this history of slavery, while at the same time you realize that the entire region is defined by violence, it’s defined by the violence of slavery, the violence of placing your body on the line to try to secure justice and whatnot. So it feels like all of these pieces just keep crashing together in my life, and I, for whatever reason, feel like God just keeps calling me to push into the chaos.

Let me ask you, in all of this, do you get a lot of pushback for being a white man who is speaking loudly about racial injustice?

Hell yeah, absolutely. I mean, as a white guy, I mean, come on.

And I’m sure you get it from both sides, right?

Yeah. I feel like the nature of following Jesus is often finding yourself in these places where you got one side saying, “What a asshole. He’s full of shit. He shouldn’t be doing this.” And you got the other side saying, “What a asshole. He’s full of shit. He shouldn’t be doing this.”

I mean, I can’t tell you how many rooms I’ve sat in with old white women talking about and crying the whole time about how racist they are, and I’m sitting here going, “Do something, do something. Quit talking, do something.” I think we have grown as a society where we are willing to hear different perspectives. There’s different leadership.

Oh, Jeff, I disagree. I don’t think we’ve grown at all.

Well, maybe not.

I think we’ve regressed. I think that the truth of the whole Black Lives Matter is that it was forcing America to look at itself in a way that was very uncomfortable. And I think that America looked at it and said, “Nah, I’m good.” And doubled down into closing its eyes and pretending like that thing didn’t happen. So I think that what was happening is that America got to look in a mirror and it said, “Yeah, I’m good. I don’t want to look at it anymore.”

Yeah. I guess what I was, the point that I was trying to make is that you do have white leftist politicians that are talking about race now in a way that they never would have, I feel like 10 years ago.

Yeah, I agree.

The opposition has gotten more diverse. But I do think that you are right. I mean, we are in a space where racism has become normal. I don’t know. I mean, I think you’re right, Al. I think that there is just this space now where people don’t want to talk about it.

I want to talk about your work on death row because I feel like when we talk about death row, I feel like number one, we really don’t want to talk about it. Society would prefer to let this thing happen in a dark corner and not bring it up and talk about it. On the flip side, you have a lot of people would consider themselves pro-life but are also a pro-death penalty. Tell me about your experience with it.

I think one of the things that influenced me the most, there was a rash of trans murders in Dallas, trans women of color being murdered in Dallas. And I was part of a group of people that were doing vigils at the sites where the bodies were found. Some of the most powerful organizing I’ve ever done because you’re lifting up people that society has said, “These people are absolutely disgusting and we want nothing to do with them whatsoever.” At the same time, I’m doing that organizing.

I was working with a guy on death row named Richard Masterson, who was a serial killer of trans women. He had been convicted of one, and there was a speculation that he had committed many other acts. And that sort of dichotomy of people getting really ticked off that I was working with this guy on death row that had been such an oppressor of the community while trying to uplift the community. It’s sort of, unless you know you ain’t going to have a home. And if you ain’t got a home, then you just want to do what’s right. And I think that that’s how I felt about the BLM movement, that’s how I felt about responding to folks who are critical of me. I just wanted to do what was right.

Yeah. When you work with these men and women on death row, tell me about them. Who are they?

Well, they’re all sorts of people. I mean, one of the places where I get in trouble by the sort of anti-death penalty crowd, anti-death penalty movement is when I say, I said this the other day, it was a guy named Chuck Crawford who was killed in Mississippi and he had murdered a young woman and horrible crimes, snatched her up. All of these crimes are horrible. And I said, somebody asked me at a press conference, they said, “What would you do if it was your daughter?” And I said, “Well, I would want to take my hands and rip them apart myself. I would want to kill them myself.”

The question is not what do we want to do as much as it is, what should we do? I don’t meet the person who committed the crime as much as I meet the person 20, 30 years later whose sat in prison and had a lot of time to grow and move and expand their life and their horizons. I mean, it’s sort of like most of these guys are committing these crimes at 19, 20, 21 years old. Well, that person is incredibly different than somebody that’s 50. These folks are most of the time desperate for any sort of touch, any sort of connection, any sort of relationship, any sort of just humanity. They just want to be treated like human beings in a system that has dehumanized them to the point where it wants to kill them.

So you’ve been to several executions, right?

Man, 10 right now.

What is it like going into that chamber?

I mean, it’s horrible. I say that it’s like going down a rabbit hole. And I tell people all the time that the question is not whether I’m going to go down the rabbit hole with these guys, the question is whether I’m going to come back. And what I mean by that is there’s such an emotional and physiological and psychological toll that it takes that you… I mean, its… I don’t know, Al, there’s just not words to describe the starkness of the walls, the feeling that the ceiling is going to crash in at any moment. The cold sweat that comes over you, the windows and seeing witnesses come and feeling like you’re in a fishbowl.

And there’s all of these sort of spaces that experientially are so horrible. And then you look up and here’s this person that you’re very close to strapped down, defenseless, and most of the time they already have an IV in and or in the case of a nitrogen execution, they already have the mask on. It looks like a respirator mask. And you’re sitting there, Al, and this is when we talk about moral injury, this is about as big of a moral injury I think as one can face.

You’re asked to sit there and pray with this person, love this person, your best friend. I tell people that my job is to come in six to three months, when somebody has six to three months left to live, and my job is to become their best friend so that their best friend will be with them when they’re executed. And so literally someone that you have worked so hard to develop that intimate of a relationship with, and your job is to sit there and do nothing while they’re murdered. And you think about it, I mean, imagine if your wife, your kids, your best friend, I mean, even a stranger being asked to sit there while they’re murdered and being expected to do something.

I mean, I get all the time, “Oh, you’re a hero, you’re so brave, you’re so this, you’re so that.” And it’s like, “No, no, I’m not. In many ways I’m a coward because I don’t do anything.” And I think that what I’m trying to speak to is the, again, that conundrum, that moral conundrum and just trying to do what is right and what is best, even amidst the horror. And I don’t know. Last night I had this nightmare that I saw all the guys that I’ve been with who’ve been executed, all of my friends, people that I’ve loved so much, and they all look at me in my dreams and say, “Jeff, why didn’t you help me?”

In the moment, in this horrible circumstance, and I’m not asking for any hope or anything like that, I’m just generally curious. These men have lived with this for well years, but as it’s getting closer and closer and closer, it must consume their thoughts as it has to consume your thoughts as well. I mean, it’s a countdown to death. Do they have a moment of peace? Are they scared the whole time? How does that play out?

I’ve had many of my guys say, “I’m the lucky one.” And I said, “What do you mean by that?” The constant thing that they say is, “We’re both going to go through this, but you’ve got to walk out of there and I get to not have to deal with any of it anymore.” And so I think the piece comes from it being the end. The thought that there’s peace in murder, I mean, it’s horrible obviously. I would be remiss if I didn’t describe what one of these nitrogen look like.

Yeah. I was just about to ask because I think it’s not because I have weird a curiosity, but I think that we as a society, whether we agree with the death penalty or not, the fact that the state is doing it, the state is basically doing it in our name, and if the state is doing it in our name, we should know exactly what the state is doing. We should deal with the weight of that.

You said a phrase that I think activists love to use, and I feel like it is the most liberal, wishy-washy bullshit is when people say, “Not in my name.”

Yeah.

And it’s like, “No, hell no. It is in your name.”

It is. It is, because you’re a part of the state.

You are guilty.

Right.

Yeah. Everybody wants to, it’s like Pilate. Everybody wants to wash their hands and act like, “We’re doing the best that we can.” Well, fuck your best. We don’t need your best, we need your body. When you go into these spaces, you hear people say all the time, “I’m either for the death penalty” or “I’m opposed to the death penalty.” And the reality of it is they don’t have any clue what they’re talking about. You catch these Southern governors all the time, like Ron DeSantis in Florida, they’ve executed 14 people this year, and he’s always talking about how awful they are and how terrible they are, and blah, blah, blah.

And he’s so glad that justice was served. These folks are cowards, man. If you are so interested in killing people, then do it yourself or at least have the courage to be there. These folks don’t want to see no executions. Judges and juries, they hand down these death sentences, but they never have to get their hands dirty. They never have to see it. They never have to participate in it. And I think we have a criminal justice system in which the courtroom and the sentence is so far removed from the lived experience of the condemned that it’s like nobody knows what they’re talking about.

Emmanuel Littlejohn, who was executed last year, somebody that I was very close to, when he was executed, I came in and he was a really funny guy, really sweet guy. But he was messing with me and I had brought some oil in the room and it was in a little bag, and I had pulled it out and I was going to anointing and said, “Well, oh.” And he said, “Shit.” And I was like, “What?” And he said, “I thought you done brought me some weed.” And so here he is, and we’re having this really human loving interaction.

And on the other side, you’ve got these state officials who are just acting like they’re at the water cooler. “What’d you do last night? Did you watch the game?” All that kind of stuff. And they ask him for his final words, and you can see the poison coming through the line and when it hits, there are seconds before the paralytic hits. And I told him I was sorry, that I did everything I could to try to stop this thing. And I told him I was sorry. And he said, really, one of the kindest things he’s ever said to me. He said, “We wouldn’t have gotten as far as we did if it hadn’t been for you.”

And it just is devastating. And then all of a sudden he goes quiet. And a lethal injection now looks like a medical procedure in a lot of ways. The paralytic hits and they’re completely unconscious. And there’s movements which sort of speak to the fact that something happens after the… I mean, obviously death happens after the paralytic, but something physiological torturous happens.

It takes sometimes 21, 22 minutes to happen and they begin to sort of gargle. And there’s this sort of watery, yawn, watery breath. And what that seems to indicate is that there’s feelings of drowning. Fluid begins to feel the lungs. The real horror there is losing your friend and just the sitting there and watching again, someone be murdered. But on the other hand, these nitrogen executions, which I was in the first one in January of 2024, Kenny Smith in Alabama.

Yeah, I’m not familiar with this.

What has happened is companies have consistently said that they don’t want their drugs used in these lethal injections like Pentobarbital and a number of other drugs, Midazolam. The pharmaceutical companies have said, “These are not what these drugs are created to do.” And so the more that people have pushed back, the harder it’s been for states to get drugs to execute people. And so what states have turned to is more novel ways of executing people and including firing squads. And also this process called nitrogen hypoxia. And it’s been done in Alabama and once in Louisiana. In January of 2024, I walk into the chamber and that was the first time they’d ever tried it.

And so nobody really knew what it was going to be like. The state of Alabama made me sign a waiver to say that if they killed me, my descendants wouldn’t hold the state accountable, liable. We go in and this respirator mask is on his face. It’s goes from the top of sort of the hairline underneath the chin. And as I go in, I pray with him, hold his hand for a bit, read scripture, and then I back up. And they start this thing and we were told that it was going to be like going to the dentist. You get knocked out and anesthetized and that’s it. It’s peaceful and whatnot.

Well, they turned the nitrogen on and Kenny begins to heave back and forth, back and forth over and over, and the face mask on this respirator mask is sometimes glass, sometimes Plexiglass, but the back of the mask was attached to the gurney. So every time he slammed his head forward, it was like his face was hitting like a plate glass window, just boom, boom, boom, over and over. And he’s popping back and forth and back and forth. And as he does that inside the mask, saliva and blood and snot, it begin to coagulate on the inside of the mask. There’s this waterfall of body fluid, and he just keeps heaving over and over and over again. It looks like there’s a million ants underneath his skin.

His skin is going every different direction. His muscles are tensed up. This lasted for almost nine minutes, eight or nine minutes. And I guess what it speaks to is the fact that there was a certain level of violence that people were accustomed to in carrying out these executions. I mean, it’s violent to strap someone down to, run an IV and kill them. This is a whole other level of violence. And it speaks to the fact that as a society, we have moved in a more violent direction. We’ve moved in a space where we are comfortable with terrorizing marginalized and oppressed people. And I think it really speaks to the fact that a lot of the movements and moments that happened in the 2010s have become just that, moments. And we’re in this space again where violence seems to be raining.

What is attending these executions, what has it done to your mental health?

Oh man, it’s terrible. I mean, it takes months after these executions to be able to function. I don’t want to even say normally, but yeah, it’s awful. And I wouldn’t wish it upon anybody. But at the same time, scripture that talks about anybody putting their hand to the plow and looking back is not fit for the kingdom of God. And so I feel like as long as there’s someone who needs me, I have to keep going until I can’t.