Witness to Death: The 2023 Writings - The Writings of Jeff Hood, #10

Witness to Death: The 2023 Writings is the account of a year spent inside the execution chamber. Jeff Hood — theologian, abolitionist, and Old Catholic priest — witnessed four executions in 2023: Scott Eizember, Arthur Brown, Anthony Sanchez, and Casey McWhorter. This book is the record of what it cost.

Hood opens the year suing the Oklahoma Department of Corrections for barring him from the chamber with Eizember, and closes it preparing to witness Alabama's first nitrogen hypoxia execution of Kenneth Smith — filing another lawsuit to secure Smith's religious liberty before the state can proceed. Between those bookends is a year of clemency letters, press releases, federal complaints, lamentations, and theological reckoning written in real time, often hours before a man dies. Hood does not smooth the edges. He documents the legal fights, the institutional indifference, the moments of grace inside the worst rooms in America.

But Witness to Death is also a book about what witnessing does to the witness. Hood writes with the plainness of someone who has run out of distance from the thing he is describing. The condemned are not abstractions here — they are men he has prayed with, argued with, anointed. This is the literature of proximity, written at the exact place where theology, law, and death converge.