Execution Intervention Project

06/06/2026

"We are called to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Not to suffocate our neighbors as we suffocate ourselves."

Days before Alabama is scheduled to execute death row inmate Jeffery Lee using nitrogen hypoxia, a group opposed to the state's ex*****on practices is directing

05/25/2026

The monster is gone.
And yet the world is not healed.
We killed the monster.
But the monster didn’t die.

Because the monster was never merely the person we condemned. The monster was the darkness within us that longs to destroy what it cannot heal.

And the monster is immortal so long as it lives within us.

The death penalty promises that killing the monster will heal what violence has broken. It doesn't. The monster was never just the condemned.

05/22/2026

05/21/2026

*Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (the nation's most prominent supporter of nitrogen ex*****ons) just lost his election.

There is a lesson here...and it is not that capital punishment is electoral poison. In red states it plainly isn't. The lesson is narrower. When the underlying penalty is already politically settled in your favor, hanging your campaign on the method gives you almost no upside and significant downside. You inherit every bad headline from every ex*****on that goes sideways. You spend earned media on a question voters aren't ranking. You concede a national identity that doesn't translate to the office you're seeking. You hand opponents a vivid set of images to use against you and you give your own supporters nothing they weren't already going to back.

Marshall ran the experiment. He had every advantage a state politician can have, he had a signature issue he believed in and he had the discipline to stay on it for two years. He finished third behind a congressman and a Navy SEAL who had never won an election. Marshall’s successor, Tim Griffin in Arkansas, Liz Murrill in Louisiana, Lynn Fitch in Mississippi and others tempted to walk to that podium should read Tuesday’s returns honestly. The data is in. Nitrogen ex*****ons are bad politics.



read full article : https://ex*****oninterventionproject.substack.com/p/the-marshall-lesson-why-nitrogen

05/20/2026

For months now, my phone has been filling up with messages from a man named Tony Von Carruthers. They arrive through the prison communication system, sometimes more than I can read in a sitting. They say the same things. The same phrases recur. The same fixations. The same accusations against the same enemies, real and imagined. He signs them with hashtags, as though he were posting to a feed on a platform that has no feed, no audience and no way to amplify anything he writes.

I am a spiritual advisor to dozens of condemned men around the country. Half a dozen of them are in Tennessee. Though Carruthers is not one of the guys I advise formally, we have connected enough for me to garner some understanding of where he is. What understanding I have not gained through messages has come through his neighbors. Men who hear him echo off the concrete day and night, blasting out the same phrases he writes to me at a volume audible through cell walls.

On Thursday, May 21, the state of Tennessee plans to execute him.

Reflections on mental health, the judicial process and the planned ex*****on of Tony Von Carruthers in Tennessee.

05/19/2026

There is a version of mercy that protects the wrong. Not mercy that falls short or arrives too late…but mercy deployed precisely, as a mechanism, to ensure that harm continues and that the harmed have no standing to name it. It looks like the real thing from every angle. It uses the same words. It produces the same temporary quiet. The difference is in what it does to the offense: instead of releasing it, it launders it.

There is a version of mercy that protects the wrong. Not mercy that falls short or arrives too late…but mercy deployed precisely, as a…

05/18/2026

I anointed Anthony in the holding cell while he taught me how to read his breathing so I would know the moment his suffering crossed a line he could no longer cross back from. He told me he would lift his legs and hold them in the air as the final signal. When he could go no further, they would fall.

I watched them rise. I watched them tremble. I watched them fall.

I have carried those legs into every night of sleep since.

The Supreme Court is not required to carry such horror with me.

But it is required to see torture for what it is.

Jeff Hood

05/16/2026

Habeas Lawyers Continue to Lie About Their Ability to Stop Ex*****ons

This brings the argument to its sharpest point. If a lawyer tells a death-row prisoner in 2026 that there is hope of habeas relief, that lawyer is lying, even if she does not know that she is. The lie is structural before it is personal. Most capital defenders are not malicious; most are doing the difficult, honorable work of trying to keep a person alive within a system that has decided to kill him. They use the only vocabulary the profession has made available to them. The vocabulary of "hope" is one of those vocabularies. The problem is that it has stopped tracking the underlying reality. A 0.29 percent relief rate is what is left of "hope" after the rhetoric is stripped away. The lawyer who tells the client "we have a chance" is, whether knowingly or not, conveying a picture of the federal courts that the federal courts have not been confirming for some time. Saying a thing that is not true to someone who has a right to the truth is what the word lying describes.

The kinder and harder thing is to tell the prisoner the truth. The chance of habeas relief is negligible. The chance of a habeas filing producing additional months of life is real. Those are different products. Offering the first while delivering the second is a deception the prisoner deserves to be spared. He deserves to know what he is filing. He deserves to know that what the filing buys him is time rather than freedom.

Jeff Hood

05/11/2026

So we should not execute ex*****oners. We should not execute them because they are people, bearers of the divine image and people should not be killed by their governments. The same applies, by the same theological logic, to murderers, to traitors, to whomever else the state might wish to put to death. The ex*****oner case is not an exception to be quarantined; it is the place where the apparatus shows its full cost and where the moral instincts that almost everyone shares about the ex*****oner…even committed proponents of the practice…reveal themselves to be more general than the proponent’s framework can comfortably acknowledge.

A theological essay arguing that the death penalty cannot survive serious moral scrutiny once we account for the soul of the ex*****oner

05/09/2026

No greater abolitionist has ever walked the earth. Happy 93rd birthday to our dear friend, Esther Brown.

ED of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty in Alabama

Explore the extraordinary life of Esther Brown, whose courage and advocacy for the condemned make her the greatest abolitionist in history.