Clarance Goode, Jr. is innocent.He has spent nearly nineteen years on Oklahoma's death row for three murders he did not commit.No DNA. No fingerprints. No weapons. No physical evidence of any kind placing him at the Thompson house on the night of August 25, 2005. What the state had was the word of a woman who had threatened her brother's life and was never charged, the word of a man who told police he was blacking out on a drug cocktail the night of the killings, and bullet...

There is no clean way to take a human life.For a century, we have pretended otherwise. The rope became the chair. The chair became the gas chamber. The gas chamber became the needle. Each method was sold as more humane than the last. Each one proved to be a lie.Now, Idaho has made the firing squad its primary method of execution. The first state in modern history to do so.Somewhere south of Boise sits a chair with straps for the ankles, the waist and the arms. Facin...

On August 18, 2026, the State of Florida executed William Silvia. The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood was in the chamber. His hand was on Will's leg when the poison started.William heard voices. Conversations constantly all around him, and nobody was ever there. In 2012, this very sick man asked the State of Florida to help him die faster. The State said yes and held him to it for fourteen years.Nobody Is There collects seven essays written by Hood in real time...from the signi...

Dennis Sochor was scheduled to die at Florida State Prison. The state called him condemned. Scripture says otherwise.In these six pieces, author, activist, and death row spiritual advisor Jeff Hood accompanies Dennis through his final days...a man who refused a last meal so he could fast and pray, who renamed the gurney his "journey gurney," who gave away everything he owned while the state prepared to take the only thing left. Kept from the execution chamber by a deadline Dennis n...

There are thirty books, total, in this collection, each with its own character and claims. This first volume, The Campaigns for the Departed, is the record of Jeff Hood's presence with specific men on specific death rows facing specific execution dates. These are the campaign writings — the op-eds and prayers and vigil speeches and spiritual reflections produced in real time, often hours before scheduled deaths. The men in these pages are not abstractions. Kosoul Chantakoumanne. S...

Jeff Hood—priest, public theologian, activist, and one of the nation's most outspoken anti-death penalty voices—has taken theology out of the academy and into the streets, execution chambers, hospital rooms, post-genocide landscapes, and the forgotten corners institutional religion often ignores.This landmark omnibus gathers eleven foundational works (2013–2023) that together form a daring, cohesive vocation of public theology. Hood operates as prophet (naming harm...

When Alabama carried out the first execution by nitrogen hypoxia in January 2024, officials promised the public a humane, painless death.Jeff Hood was in the execution chamber. A priest who has accompanied condemned men to their final moments, Hood witnessed the nation's newest method of execution firsthand. What he saw—and what he documents here—stands in stark contrast to the assurances offered by government officials.Part eyewitness testimony, part legal history, part in...

The path Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood took is a long way from the ministry he imagined when he was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister at The Rock Baptist Church in Rex, Georgia, in June 12, 2006. Since then, he's marched in protests, attended twelve executions, become a priest in the Old Catholicism tradition, and written countless sermons, op-eds, and blog posts about love and justice.This collection celebrates the twentieth year of his ordained ministry by anthologizing twenty pieces ...

Dusty Ray Spencer was seventy-four years old. He was a Marine. He was a man Florida decided to kill.Too Old to Kill is Jeff Hood's real-time chronicle of the final weeks before Spencer's execution on June 25, 2026...the oldest person put to death in Florida's modern history. It moves from legal argument to open letter to sermon to grief. It shows a case built on a death sentence imposed without a jury...on mental illness the state's own experts could not dispute...on a man...

Five jurors looked at Marbel Mendoza and said: not death.For more than three decades, Mendoza has waited on death row for a crime born in addiction, panic, and a confrontation that spiraled into tragedy. His co-defendants served their sentences and went home. He remains.Not Commensurate examines whether the ultimate punishment fits the crime as the evidence actually establishes it. Through careful review of trial records and constitutional standards, the b...

In 2001, Paul Everett was sentenced to death for the murder of Kelli Bailey. The jury was told there was no DNA pointing to anyone else. But critical biological evidence—taken from Bailey's own hands and fingernails—was collected and never tested.For more than twenty years, Everett has remained on death row while the evidence that could confirm or contradict the State's theory sits in storage. Condemned in the Dark examines the trial, the investigation that stopped too soo...

In 1991, eighteen-year-old Tony Egbuna Ford was sentenced to death for a murder he said he did not commit. More than three decades later, he is still on Texas' death row and maintains his innocence.Condemned Without Cause examines the wrongful conviction of Tony Ford through court records, sworn testimony, expert eyewitness analysis, and the accounts of three independent witnesses who say another man confessed to the crime. It documents a biased photo lineup, suppressed do...