Execution Intervention Project

10/19/2026

...the soldiers who may be ordered to take part. They entered an institution that asks them to protect human life, sometimes at terrible cost. They should not have to pretend that shooting a restrained man is another administrative duty. Once a soldier learns to fire on a bound prisoner on command, the distance to the next bound prisoner gets shorter. Once a president learns he can order it, the list of people he might order it for gets longer.

Besides, isn’t Donald Trump the last person on earth you would trust with a r***e?

I watched a man fight for his life under nitrogen gas for at least sixteen minutes. Now Trump hasapproved a firing squad for a paralyzed prisoner.

10/15/2026

Join us this Sunday @ 8pm for the launch of The Lie of the Clean Kill...an examination of the proliferation of the firing squad.

REGISTER HERE: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/qr3ReBTFT0GJNcVdzLn7yw

lbook here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HHTDHWY9?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

10/10/2026

There is a particular kind of silence that follows an ex*****on. It is not the silence of peace. It is not the silence of something settled. It is the silence of a world that keeps moving while something inside you has stopped. The traffic still moves. The lights still come on. People still ask what you would like for dinner. Your phone keeps ringing. Somewhere, someone is laughing at a joke you cannot hear. The world has not noticed that you have come home carrying something you do not know how to put down.

I know how to be present with a man who is dying. I know how to sit in a visitation room and listen. I know something about the strange concentration that comes when a life is approaching its end. Everything becomes immediate. The words spoken. The silences. A hand held against glass. There is no need to pretend that tomorrow will be ordinary when everyone in the room knows that tomorrow may not come.

Coming home is different.

At home, the urgency disappears but the weight remains. There is no ex*****on clock to watch. No guard waiting outside the door. No reason to keep your attention fixed on the next thing that must happen. You are left with yourself and sometimes that is the hardest place to be.

I have wondered whether this is part of what Isaiah means when he speaks of God wiping away the tears from every face. Not only the tears that fall in the terrible moment itself but the tears that come later, when everyone else has gone home and the one who witnessed the suffering is left trying to understand how to live with what he has seen.

God Will Wipe Away the Tears from Every Face: There is no ceremony for coming home from an ex*****on. The God who meets the witness.

10/06/2026

The independent Catholic priest believes the end that what awaits Howard, who has the IQ of a 12-year-old, is an “atrocity”

Rev Hood, who had just visited Howard before speaking to The Sun, said: “He realises that people are coming to tell him goodbye and I think that is scary for him.

“But I’m not sure that he knows what’s going to happen, because a couple of sentences later, he’ll say, ‘are you going to come see me Friday?’

”And it’s like, ‘dude, you’re going to be dead.’

KILLER Jamaal Howard is the first death row prisoner to face lethal injection since Christa Pike’s botched ex*****on. Friends and family are calling for tomorrow night’s ex*****on in Texas to…

10/06/2026

"Then, Jamaal took the language of the courts and viscerally translated it into his own body. He made me hear the distance between being told you will die and having to imagine what dying will feel like if the first attempt does not work."

Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood just published in Texas Observer.

https://www.texasobserver.org/the-distance-between-dying-and-death/

After a botched ex*****on in Tennessee, Texas is set to kill Jamaal Howard, who has so many mental health problems and intellectual disabilities that he doesn't understand how he will be killed.

10/02/2026

Death row inmate's spiritual advisor says botch could happen 'any time'

The Rev. Jeff Hood, spiritual advisor to Jamaal Howard, the next person scheduled to be executed in the U.S., told USA TODAY in an Oct. 1 interview that Pike's botched ex*****on is creating "a tremendous amount of anxiety" as Howard’s Oct. 7 ex*****on date approaches.

"One of these ex*****ons could be botched at any time and at any place," Hood said. "What happened in Tennessee shows all of us what’s possible."

Hood called the murder of Colleen Slemmer "horrifying" but said the botched ex*****on was society "exchanging one horror for another."

"Instead of trying to get ourselves to places where we limit the horrifying situations, we perpetuate them and call them normal," Hood said. "What happened last night is not normal."

“Gov. Lee constantly talks about how he is pro-death penalty, how this is going the right way and he wants this to be clean,” Hood said. “If the buck stops with him, then why was he not there?”

The ex*****on of murderer Christa Pike on Sept. 30 descended into chaos in Tennessee. Here's what we know.