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Hindustan Times
27-05-2025
- General
- Hindustan Times
Who is Rev. Jeff Hood? Spiritual adviser who witnessed 9 death row executions nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
A man who has witnessed as many as nine death row executions has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Rev. Jeff Hood was reportedly nominated for the distinguished award by David Lemley, a professor of religion at Southern California's Pepperdine University. "He's putting himself in a position to love 'the least of these,'" Lemley told USA TODAY. "It is peace for peace's sake. It's good for good's sake. I think that's worth awarding," Lemley added, explaining that Hood's nomination is based more on his personal definition of peace, and not on what is commonly associated with the award. The US Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that if inmates wanted, spiritual advisers would be allowed inside execution chambers. Hood, an Arkansas native, has since made it his mission to be present in the final moments of inmates. Hood previously told USA TODAY that it validates him in his work in being there for "his guys" at the end of their lives. "The greater honor for me is the opportunity to witness God's love flow in and out of the lives of those we marginalize and oppress here in the land of the living," said Hood, whose official job is to befriend the death row inmates in the final days of their lives. "My job is to come into their lives when they have six to three months left to live and become their best friend," Hood added. "I become their best friend in order to be their best friend when they die." Hood, a death penalty activist, is a theologian educated at Auburn University, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, according to After Violence Archive. 'His primary interest has always been the power of spirituality to bring about liberation,' Patheos says on Hood. 'In addition to his formal studies, Dr. Hood completed multiple units of Clinical Pastoral Education at a Level I trauma center in Fort Worth, Texas.' Hood was ordained to the ministry at the Rock Baptist Church in Rex, Georgia, back in 2006. He was incardinated into the priesthood of the Catholic Church (Old Catholic) at Saint Miriam Parish and Friary in Flourtown, Pennsylvania, in 2022. He has written more than 100 books, including the famous book titled The Courage to Be Queer, which was named the third-best religion book of 2016 at the Independent Publishers Book Awards. He has notably served in the governing leadership of various organizations, including the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and Fellowship of Reconciliation USA. Lemley wrote in the nominating letter, "I believe Dr. Hood's person and work are worthy of the committee's consideration as an example of bringing both the peace that flows from honoring the dignity of disenfranchised people, and the peace that flows through the channel of one human spirit to another.' Noa Dubois, the wife of former Texas death row inmate Steven Nelson, told the outlet that Hood's guidance was instrumental in her husband's last days. "When you know you know your time and date of (execution), you start to ask all those questions you know in your mind," Dubois said. "Am I a good person? How can I achieve redemption? Is there hell? Is there heaven?' Jeff was really able to answer all those questions or at least guide Steven through those times of uncertainty.' Hood and Dubois are believed to have remained close even after the execution. "It's proof of understanding and humanity to have the connection with spirituality to put aside people's actions and just still love them and be present for them and help them navigate one of the worst horrible things that this country is doing," Dubois said. Hood will find out in October if he wins the prestigious award.
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Using nitrogen gas in executions will further delay Arkansas death penalty
An oxygen mask. Alabama attaches a similar-looking mask to a condemned inmate when conducting executions using nitrogen hypoxia. (Getty Images) When it comes to administering the death penalty, perhaps the most intractable difficulty is that it's just really, really difficult to kill someone in a way that isn't cruel or unusual or messy or doesn't make us unduly squeamish. Taking someone who is alive and making them dead requires some level of violence — injecting a fatal dose of chemicals, zapping them with electricity, shooting them, breaking their neck with a rope — that raises profound moral and constitutional issues. And state legislators, including here in Arkansas, are finding new and creative ways to tinker with the machinery of death, as they try to overcome hurdles slowing the pace of executions. Rep. Jeff Wardlaw, R-Hermitage, and Sen. Blake Johnson, R-Corning, have proposed a bill to allow the Division of Correction to use nitrogen gas as a method of execution, in addition to the current method of lethal injection. The bill has passed the House and will likely clear the Senate, given that 20 of the 35 senators are co-sponsors. When Wardlaw defended his bill in committee, he said the idea sprang from a conversation with family members of victims of last year's mass shooting in Fordyce about possible changes to the state's death penalty laws. Attorney General Tim Griffin's staff floated the idea of nitrogen executions during those discussions, he said. A firing squad would be far less painful and far less horrific than a nitrogen execution. – Rev. Jeff Hood, North Little Rock priest who witnessed an Alabama execution Only one jurisdiction in the United States has ever used nitrogen gas for executions, the state of Alabama, which has killed four men with this method. And here's what nitrogen gas executions there look like: The prisoner is strapped to a gurney, a mask similar to a fireman's mask is placed over his face, and he is then suffocated with nitrogen, a colorless, odorless gas that isn't toxic but kills by replacing oxygen in the lungs as the prisoner breathes it in. Officials in Alabama have insisted that executions with nitrogen gas are painless and result in rapid unconsciousness. Wardlaw called it 'a very quick, humane death.' But the Rev. Jeff Hood, an Old Catholic priest from North Little Rock — who witnessed Alabama's first nitrogen execution last year of Kenny Smith — said what he saw was neither quick nor painless and amounted to torture. 'This is like strapping people to the top of a rocket and saying, 'We don't know where you're going, but we're going to light the fuse,' said Hood, whose ministry includes working as a spiritual adviser to Smith and other death row inmates. Hood said he watched Smith struggle from the moment nitrogen was introduced into the mask, as his body began reacting to the loss of oxygen. Smith convulsed, strained so hard against the straps keeping him on the gurney that it shook, and pushed his face against the mask, which filled up with fluid as he struggled for air. It took 22 minutes before prison officials closed the curtains to indicate that Smith was dead. Before the execution, prison officials placed oxygen monitors in and around the death chamber and required Hood to sign a liability waiver in case he was harmed by a nitrogen leak, which he said amounted to 'the state admitting that there's a danger to the people in the chamber.' Having witnessed eight other executions using lethal injection, Hood said Smith's execution with nitrogen 'was by far the worst that I've ever seen' — so much so that he says he'd counsel inmates facing execution to select any other method if they are given an option. 'A firing squad would be far less painful and far less horrific than a nitrogen execution,' Hood said. Hood is an anti-death penalty activist, and, as such, his views were treated with some indifference when he testified against Wardlaw's bill at the Capitol. However, media reports of Alabama's executions also describe prisoners struggling as they were being suffocated. And, of course, the problem with judging whether a new method of death is truly quick and painless is that the only people who can accurately describe the experience are dead. The introduction of nitrogen gas as a method of execution comes as the death penalty has become something of a dead letter in Arkansas, primarily because the state is having trouble acquiring the drugs used in its lethal injection protocol as drug companies balk at getting involved. Death sentences are becoming rarer (the 25 men on Arkansas' death row have all been there since at least 2018), and the state has executed just four men since 2005. All of those executions took place in an eight-day period in April 2017 as Gov. Asa Hutchinson and corrections officials raced to complete eight scheduled executions before the state's supply of one of the lethal injection drugs expired — a gruesome spectacle that drew international condemnation. Presumably, Arkansas would only proceed with a nitrogen gas execution as an alternative method if lethal injection continues to be unavailable. However, Wardlaw and Johnson's bill leaves the choice of execution method entirely to the discretion of the director of the Division of Correction. The bill doesn't address the quality or concentration of the nitrogen or whether it should be administered with a mask or in a gas chamber, letting corrections officials develop a protocol for carrying out nitrogen gas executions with no guidance for how that should be done or the parameters of the protocol. Critics of the bill believe those provisions run afoul of a 2012 Arkansas Supreme Court decision, Hobbs vs. Jones, that struck down the state's death penalty statute because it gave the Department of Corrections too much discretion in what drugs would be used in lethal injections, without sufficient legislative guidance. A statute that provides 'absolute, unregulated and undefined discretion in an administrative agency bestows arbitrary powers and is an unlawful delegation of legislative powers,' the court majority said. The irony here is that should the state ever try to execute an inmate with nitrogen, it will trigger a lengthy legal battle up and down both federal and state courts, which will indefinitely delay executions that the nitrogen option was supposed to jump start. In addition, the three largest U.S. manufacturers of nitrogen gas have responded to states adopting nitrogen as an execution method by prohibiting their products from being used. And that is the conundrum at the heart of the public policy debate over capital punishment — Arkansas and other death penalty states are tangling themselves in more and more legal, ethical and practical knots as they try to rescue a policy that remains politically popular but has become increasingly unworkable. Given the legal challenges and the unavailability of drugs, there's a decent chance that none of the 25 men on death row in Arkansas — some of whom have been there since the 1990s — will ever face execution, by either lethal injection or nitrogen gas. The rational choice would be to accept that fact, move on, and stop pouring resources into defending an untenable policy. The irrational choice would be adopting a new, experimental method of execution, triggering a whole new batch of legal challenges, and pretending that we've figured out a way to kill people that's less violent than the methods already in use.
