The Last Face Death Row Inmates See

M cAlester, Oklahoma, looks like an Edward Hopper painting in the 5 a.m. gloom. An orange cat slinks through a neon puddle outside a gas station; a donut store sign flickers; and then there’s the scene outside Oklahoma State Penitentiary, also known as Big Mac. Underneath the harsh glow of streetlights, the Rev. Jeff Hood inspects a spiderweb woven between the trees hemming in the prison, the only thing that McAlester is really known for. Studded with dew, the gossamer strands make a beautiful trap in the predawn darkness. “Don’t wanna mess up his web,” Hood says, his Southern drawl wistful, as the eight-legged architect chitters off.

Hood turns back to what’s unfolding behind the prison walls, where Emmanuel Littlejohn, for whom Hood has been a spiritual adviser for the past two years, could be put to death in just a few hours. Death rows all over the country function like that web in Hood’s eyes: complex, sticky, and often indiscriminate — literal death traps. A foulmouthed firebrand who doesn’t really care if the men he works with are innocent or not, Hood thinks all people are worthy of love and redemption, the death penalty is evil, and those men tunneling their way into the guts of Big Mac to administer the needle are just as murderous as some of the folks they’re set to kill. 

The Pardon and Parole Board recommended Littlejohn clemency weeks ago, but Gov. Kevin Stitt has yet to tip his hand yes or no. He’s not done praying on it, he says. And so Hood waits, standing sentry outside the prison gates. He cuts a striking figure, despite his slight stature: half metal roadie with his bald head and long, ZZ Top beard and quirky glasses, half classic priest — his long black robe fluttering in the damp breeze.

“I always like to stand here this early because it makes them have to pass by me and think about what they’re about to do,” Hood says as a shiny black truck carrying prison officials trundles through the gates. He may look stoic, but Hood feels ill. In just under five hours, he’ll either see Littlejohn beaming in celebration, or strapped to a gurney.

Editor’s picks

The public pays precious little attention to the majority of death-row inmates; the world only seems to tune in when a celebrity or organization rallies around a convict they deem innocent. Not Hood. No case is too small, or man too beyond forgiveness. “Back when I was growing up, it was all about the Rapture,” he says. “This idea that the world was going to end at any moment — and so there was an urgency. I don’t feel like that anymore, but that urgency is still there. People are dying.” 

‘A Grisly Circus’

In a country built on equal parts brutality and retribution, the death penalty has always been a moral quandary. Initially, the practice was a kind of safeguard against societal collapse. The first penitentiaries weren’t built until the late 1700s, so more extreme sentences were deemed necessary to prevent discord. As the country developed a prison system, those facing the death penalty were often people of color. “The death penalty is 1,000 percent rooted in racism,” says professor Frank R. Baumgartner, a death-penalty expert at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, citing how Black citizens were routinely executed in the past, first by first slave catchers and then by the Ku Klux Klan. 

Later, the system added an air of procedure with the 1923 Supreme Court case Moore v. Dempsey, which came on the heels of a 1919 Arkansas race riot where white “vigilantes” massacred at least 200 Black people following the death of a white man. After six Black men were quickly sentenced to death, the appeal made its way to the highest court, which ruled that federal courts could step in to ensure that defendants receive a fair trial at the state level. However, we’re still under the shadow of racism. “In the modern era, when executions have been carried out exclusively for murder, 75 percent of the cases involve the murder of white victims, even though about half of all homicide victims in America are Black,” says Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

Related Content

The 1960s ushered in debates about the constitutionality of the federal death penalty, due, in part, to a postwar sense of moral superiority. And by 1972, the Supreme Court put a pause to the practice with Furman v. Georgia, ruling that it was “capricious and arbitrary,” after three inmates sued the state due to their unequal sentencing. (They were all sentenced to death, one for murder, two for rape.) That ruling, however, led states to rewrite their own statutes, and made quick work of establishing their own death rows — particularly in the South. Utah resident Gary Gilmore was the first to be executed following this brief moratorium after murdering a gas-station employee and a motel manager in 1976. In lieu of a lengthy appeals process, Gilmore opted for a firing squad and was executed in 1977. The papers hailed his death as a “grisly circus.”

Despite the ire that Gilmore’s death raised, today, the U.S. practices the death penalty at both the state and federal level. The federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988 (for crimes including treason and murder), while 27 states boast death rows teeming with more than 2,000 inmates. As laws have changed, though, folks have continued to grapple over the humanity of the practice: In 1936, 59 percent of citizens were in favor of the death penalty for convicted murderers, while today that number has dropped to 47 percent. And that reluctance and confusion arises, in part, because of just how random the death penalty can be. 

Baumgartner attributes the recent drop in popularity, though, to the idea that the U.S. could be killing innocent people, which became easier to argue in the wake of DNA technology. This change in sentiment ushered in organizations like the Innocence Project and celebrity abolitionists like Sister Helen Prejean, a nun and spiritual adviser who immortalized her work in the 1993 book Dead Man Walking.

Unlike Prejean, though, Hood doesn’t just advocate for women and men who maintain their innocence — instead, he chooses to fight for those the system, and the world, forgot: the men who may not be innocent, that are anything but innocent, who he still believes have a right to live.

‘I Felt Like I Got Saved‘

Back in the Nineties, when Hood, 41, was a God-fearing teen in South Atlanta, Georgia, he was more busy trying to save his own soul than anyone else’s. “Growing up in this evangelical Christian world, where you’re always scared of the end of the world, I remember, for days, I would just say the sinners’ prayer over and over and over again to make sure that I was saved,” he says. “So there was a hyper-religiosity that I grew up with — and it was terrifying.”

Hood was deep in that hyper-religious realm for years, though — becoming ordained at just 22 as a Southern Baptist minister. (In 2022, he was reordained as Catholic — “Old Catholic,” as he specifies on his website.) It was at the conservative Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, though, where Hood started shaking off the shackles of his childhood religiosity. His old mentor called him from Atlanta — the same man who had helped him get ordained the year before. He was dying of lung cancer, he said, and wanted to say goodbye. So Hood piled into his car and drove all night to visit the dying 75-year-old.

When Hood finally clasped the man’s papery hand in his, his mentor told him softly, “I’m gay, and I always have been.” He died soon thereafter. “That was earth-shattering for me,” Hood says. “I talk about it like the queer Jesus saved my soul. All of a sudden something happened within me that transformed me. It really felt like I got saved — from this sort of backwards thinking and trying to compartmentalize people and trying to suffocate people with my own ideations of what they were supposed to be.” 

From then on, Hood set about forging his own relationship with faith, marrying it with the activism that has come to shape his life. As he continued to add more degrees to his résumé, Hood became involved in the plight of Troy Davis, a Black man who was sentenced to death for shooting and killing a police officer in 1989. By the time his scheduled execution rolled around in 2011, Davis had an army of abolitionists at his back — including Hood and his wife, Emily, whom he married that year. 

It would be a while, though, before Hood would enter the death chamber. A year after Davis took his last breath, he and Emily settled in Texas, after bouncing around between Georgia and Mississippi for school and work — and having their first set of twins (they’d later welcome another pair). There, Hood threw himself into activism: campaigning for local churches to be more accepting of LGBTQ+ parishioners, getting arrested outside the White House in 2014 while protesting deportations, and putting together a 2016 Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas that turned tragic when an Army vet killed five police officers.

That incident still haunts Hood, who organized the action after the police shooting of two unarmed Black men. He still remembers when the bullets started flying on that hot July night, how he grabbed his chest, looking for blood. He recalls the horror as he realized what was unfolding there on the street as 25-year-old Micah Johnson fired into the crowd, before he was ultimately killed by law enforcement. “How could anyone fathom any of it? I was horrified,” he says. “I couldn’t breathe. I still can’t. The shots fired that night are still lodged in my soul. I quickly realized that the work of love and justice is a banishment from any semblance of clarity. The spiritual requirement to stand with all of your neighbors remains a nearly impossible burden. Yet, it is the burden of lived faith.”

Hood may have already been a rabble-rouser at this point in his activist journey, but he effectively made himself an enemy to some after a clip of him at the protest before the shooting aired on Fox News where he raged about the state of race in America: “God damn white America! White America is a fucking lie!” The right wouldn’t be his only detractors, as it turned out — especially after he started working with men most would dismiss as monsters.

‘This Shit Ain’t Like the Movies’

Hood calls them his “guys,” the men our country wants to kill. He’s written books with them, hung their photos in his “fortress of solitude” (a.k.a. his home office), and even let them talk to his five kids — within reason. And although Hood says he loves them all, some he loves for who they are, some in spite of it.

Hood became a legally recognized spiritual adviser in 2022 after the Supreme Court ruled that folks on death row could have one accompany them to the death chamber; in 2021, an inmate named John Ramirez sued to have his longtime pastor present at his execution. Still, Hood began talking to incarcerated men years before that — after he found himself meditating on Jesus’ words in Matthew 25:43: “I was in prison and you didn’t visit me.”

After sending letters to a cadre of men sentenced to death in 2011, it was trial and error at first; some men asked for money, others for photos of his wife (a definite no-go). There were tender moments, sure — like with Juan Garcia, who prayed with Hood before his 2015 execution. And then there were incidents that would test even the most patient religious men, like Hood’s dealings with Kerry Allen, who raped and murdered his girlfriend’s two-year-old daughter in 2000. “I’ve always tried not to look these guys up before I go and talk to them. I want to give them a chance to be known as something other than a serial killer or rapist,” Hood says. 

He still gets chills, however, when he remembers meeting Allen on Texas’ death row. “I’m sitting there talking to him, and he’s like, really into clowns,” Hood says. “So I’m sitting there, taking all this shit in.” That “shit” being what he did to the child — and past misdeeds.. 

Hood was gobsmacked, but he told himself that God had called on him to listen to men like Allen, so he did just that. Even after Allen crossed the line. “I remember I asked him before I left, ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ And he said, ‘You can send me a picture of your kids,’” Hood recalls. “And I just remember just being like, ‘Oh, shit. I’m in pretty deep now, man, what the fuck?’” Still, he didn’t give up on the man. “We communicated back and forth for a number of months. He just sort of eventually checked out mentally,” Hood says. “I do my best to never let evil statements or actions get the last word.” Allen has yet to be executed.

If even the most twisted of incarcerated men couldn’t deter Hood from his calling, neither could the cops, who arrested him in 2016 after he crossed a police line at a protest outside the execution of another Texas inmate. (He got one year of probation.) And the state itself couldn’t hold him back, as it turned out, which Oklahoma tried to do when Scott Eizember was set to die in 2023. 

According to prosecutors, Eizember broke into the home of Patsy and A.J. Cantrell, an elderly couple, in Depew, Oklahoma, in 2003. His ex-girlfriend lived across the street, and he planned to hide there and wait for her. When the two returned home, surprising him, Eizember killed Patsy with the couple’s shotgun and beat A.J. Cantrell to death with it. It was a crime that horrified the no-stoplight town, leading to one of the longest manhunts in Oklahoma history.

Hood found Eizember a mercurial man, who could be in turn cruel and thankful, generous and spiteful. “People romanticize these relationships,” Hood says. “[But] I’m giving myself over to a certain level of abuse sometimes. Eizember, he would scream. He would say, ‘Fuck you, you sack of shit.’ And it’s like, damn, this shit ain’t like the movies.”

Still, Hood stood by Eizember until the Oklahoma Department of Corrections tried to bar him from attending the execution and aired him out in the press, telling the AP: “The spiritual adviser in this case has been arrested multiple times for such outbursts in other states, demonstrating a blatant disregard for the experiences of victims’ families and the solemnity of the process.” That rankled Hood. He’d been arrested as part of peaceful protests, and it’s not like he was going to leap on the gurney and wrench the needle from the executioner’s hands. As for “outbursts,” Hood says he’s never done anything untoward in the death chamber.

In the end, Hood sued the DOC and their spokesperson for defamation (that case was later dismissed), as well as the Oklahoma Department of Corrections for access to the chamber; he succeeded. And so he was there for Eizember during his final moments, when, Hood says, the incarcerated man told Hood he loved him. 

“When we got into the execution chamber, we were woven together, and when they executed him, it was like someone ripped the stitching apart,” Hood recalls. “There are times when I was terrified of Scott … but it’s complicated, the evil and the beauty that dance in all of us.”

‘Who Are You Supposed to Be?’

For all his sins, Eizember was the one who led Hood to Emmanuel Littlejohn in 2022. Also incarcerated at Big Mac, the aging and infirm Littlejohn wasn’t getting that many letters, Eizember told Hood. Maybe he could be one of his guys? Littlejohn had been behind bars for nearly 30 years at this point; he was sentenced to death for the 1992 murder of convenience-store owner Kenneth Meers in a robbery gone wrong. Littlejohn maintained his innocence, though, claiming that his co-conspirator Glenn Bethany pulled the trigger. Bethany, for his part, got life in prison. (Bethany did not respond to my request for comment.)

As usual, though, Hood was more interested in the man than the crime, and he found a kindred spirit in Littlejohn. The first time they got on the phone, Littlejohn immediately started teasing him. Hood was giving him the spiel about his work, when the other man cut in. “Who are you supposed to be?” he asked in his deep, laconic drawl. Hood responded: “We’re about to figure that out together.” His family was similarly skeptical at first. “Our first impression of Jeff was, why does this guy have a dress on and why does he have that long beard? Is he like a sensei or something?” Littlejohn’s niece, Blessing Sanders, says. 

Soon, though, the two formed a close bond, laughing, talking about their kids, and praying. And it continued that way for the months that followed, as Hood grew closer with Littlejohn’s mother, Ceily Mason, and his sister, Augustina Littlejohn — as he watched more and more men die. There was Anthony Sanchez in September 2023, whose hands turned blue after the Oklahoma executioner administered the needle. And then there was Kenneth Smith, the first person to be executed in the U.S. using nitrogen gas — a dicey, untested method that could have put Hood at risk if there were to be a leak.

Hood watched Smith — who had become his close friend — gasping for breath like a goldfish out of water in a way that will haunt the reverend forever. “The moral pain of the entire experience was so great that I’d wished that I’d been the one who’d been suffocated,” he says.

‘They Think You’re Crazy as Shit’

The sun beats down on Jeff Hood’s shaved head as he runs the mower over the shaggy front yard of his Little Rock, Arkansas, home. His family moved out here a while back for Emily’s career, and to escape the “threats and bullshit” they faced in Texas due to Hood’s work. It’s a rare moment of peace from the din of five small kids — and from his guys calling him from noisy prisons at all hours of the day. As he pauses to wipe the sweat from his brow, Hood spies a brown GMC pickup idling in front of his house, a 70-something white man with a shaved head and ripped white T-shirt mean-mugging him from the front seat.

“Dr. Hood,” the man calls — and the reverend tenses. In his experience, when people get overly formal, things are about to go sideways.

“Yeah?” He ventures, cutting the power on his mower.

The man glares back. “I’m going to take you out. Soon,” he growls, shooting Hood a finger gun, and speeds away. It seems the bullshit has found him once again.

Every time Hood’s involved in a high-profile case, the crazies come out, threatening to do to him what his guys have done to others. The irony is not lost on Hood. Although he’s not keen on the cops, Hood calls the police, who come by to take his statement as his gaggle of kids swing from the porch like monkeys, eyeing the officer’s notepad. 

Hood doesn’t hide much from his kids — not his job or his

guys or the downsides to both. “They’re very aware [of the death threats], and they’re also aware that people have said they want to kill them,” he says. “I don’t have this mentality of, ‘I have to protect them from all this.’ The best way to protect them is to make them aware.”

He does, though, pick and choose who speaks to his kids and how. The brainy pharmacist Bart Johnson on Alabama’s death row delights in doing Simpsons impressions for Hood’s cartoon-obsessed son. And Hood never tells the kids that these men are scheduled to die, just that he’s trying to save them. So when Littlejohn’s Sept. 26 date starts approaching, Hood’s brood is aware, at least in some capacity, why this man is calling their dad every night at eight. He tries to keep them shielded from the particulars, though.

“It takes me probably a month to six weeks to get back to functioning after one of these executions,” Hood says, already worried about the toll this will take on his psyche — how he will weather it all. “Imagine that every night you turned into a mermaid and you have all of these crazy experiences as a mermaid, and then you come back to life, and there’s nobody to talk to because nobody knows the [what] hell you’re talking about. And if you talk about it too much, they think you’re crazy as shit.”

Hood’s certainly feeling crazy when he wakes up in an austere hotel with a view of a highway that leads to McAlester, Oklahoma, on Aug. 7. It seems like a sign that his car alarm starts bleating in the parking lot outside the hotel when he fumbles the key. When he finally pulls up in front of the low-slung, dun-colored Pardon and Parole Board building in Oklahoma City, Hood checks his reflection in the rearview. “Should’ve checked those bags at the gate,” he mutters.

Hood has his battle gear on — long robe, work boots, battered Bible — but he’s been in attack mode for days. Earlier, he got word from Littlejohn’s lawyers that the prosecution may be targeting him during the clemency hearing, claiming that he’s an attention seeker, a charlatan. He’s used to those accusations, but they needle him all the same. In the past, he’s been accused of doing this for money, for fame, for anything other than God. He’s been accused of giving men shoddy legal advice, of going rogue. His bank account is a sieve, he says, since he doesn’t make any money off his activism. And he’s helped guys ditch their lawyers but only at their request, when the lawyers haven’t been in contact with their clients for years. 

Still, he’s got his supporters to keep him going — even ones he’s found in the most unlikely of places. Take Lindsey Barnett, the granddaughter of Scott Eizember’s victims. Barnett was staunchly pro-death penalty until she witnessed Eizember’s execution, which she describes as “cold and vile and disgusting.” After Eizember took his last breath, she flagged Hood down outside the gates of Big Mac. They became fast friends. “When I saw him in the execution chamber with Scott, I could tell in my heart he was not there for any other reason other than he was trying to save someone’s soul,” she says.

Fellow abolitionist Alli Sullivan, Death Penalty Action’s communications coordinator, also initially butted heads with Hood before forming a bond. In 2022, Sullivan was campaigning hard for Melissa Lucio, who was given the death penalty in 2008 for killing her two-year-old daughter, despite claims of innocence. Hood was irritated, she says, because he thought that the organization was ignoring other executions in favor of a cause célèbre. “He just made it known that that bothered him,” Sullivan says. “And so that was our first interaction. It was a wonky interaction, but very soon thereafter we started working together and getting really close.”

And then there’s his guys, like Bart Johnson, who does the Simpsons impressions. “You see his heart,” Johnson says of Hood. And Michael Bane, on Tennessee’s death row, who counts Hood as one of his best friends. “There’s nobody like Jeff, as far as I’m concerned. I mean, nobody,” he says. “He’s gonna listen to you. He’s gonna tell you what he thinks — whether you like what he says or not.”

So, yes, that conference room may be full of people who think Hood is a fraud, but he has work to do. For Littlejohn. For himself. So he steels himself, taking a seat in the second row next to Littlejohn’s mom, Ceily. Littlejohn’s lawyers take the stand first, recounting the sad story of Littlejohn’s life. His mom was an addict who had him at just 15; she said he was “ruined from the womb” due to her drug use. They speak of how his grandmother’s house was riddled with gambling, prostitution, and drugs — and how Littlejohn watched his father abuse his mother. They end by reflecting on the man’s current sorry state: He’s wheelchair-bound after a series of strokes, disabled by a white matter disease that only continues to eat away at him. Through it all, Hood holds Ceily’s hand tight.

The worst isn’t over, though. When the prosecution takes the floor, they unleash on Littlejohn, spelling out every bad thing he’d ever done. They share prison conversations between Littlejohn and his family where he jokes that while he hadn’t killed Kenneth Meers, he wishes he had — and a trial excerpt where he threatens Meers’ brother: “I killed the motherfucker, I’ll kill you.”

That same brother, Bill, takes the stand next, a hulking man who nevertheless looks small surrounded by his family. “This tragedy has had such a horrible influence on so many people, we struggle to move on, especially myself,” he says, his voice shaking. “The anger is unbelievable.… I felt we’ve been on lockdown all these years.” (Bill did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Hood just sits there, taking it all in as the prosecution sneers at his “so-called media campaign.” “This shit is over,” he thinks. “Might as well go ahead and have the execution tomorrow, because we didn’t get no damn clemency.” But then Littlejohn speaks, Zooming in from Big Mac in his red prison shirt, and Hood feels some spark of hope kindling.

“First and foremost, I want to speak to the Meers family,” Littlejohn says, his voice even. It’s a feat for the man, who struggles to speak sometimes due to his medical issues. “I have caused y’all so much hurt, and I’m sorry.… [But] I can assure you that no one gets better from killing me.” The reverend smiles, proud of Littlejohn for keeping his cool.

A quick vote follows, as mundane as taking a coffee order, and Hood and Ceily are bowled over when the board votes three to two to recommend Littlejohn clemency. Mason looks up at Hood, her eyes wide. “What did I just hear? Did he just get clemency?” she asks, the reality of it all not quite sinking in.

“This just doesn’t happen,” Hood says later, high off the victory. “A Black man accused of these horrible crimes in a place like Oklahoma. I mean, it just doesn’t happen.”

‘A Baptism of Shit’

Emmanuel Littlejohn may have been recommended clemency in August, but the fight continues as the days tick by to his scheduled execution. Attorney General Gentner Drummond is still gunning for the needle, and Gov. Stitt has remained mum on his decision. The euphoria starts to wear off, and Hood’s calls with Littlejohn ping-pong between hope and despair. 

During one call, Hood gets more and more incensed about the audacity of the state, how it’s making Littlejohn wait, how it’s essentially torture. “Calm down, brother,” Littlejohn tells Hood. He chuckles sadly, realizing that the man sentenced to die is comforting him. 

In a lot of ways, though, Hood feels like David facing down Goliath — especially as he watches the world rally around Marcellus Williams, an inmate sentenced to die in Missouri two days before Littlejohn. Unlike Littlejohn, Williams has the full force of the Innocence Project, as well his alleged victim’s family, a slew of supporters, and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, who took out a full-page ad in a local paper calling for a stop to the execution. Meanwhile, Littlejohn has a smattering of supporters and, of course, Hood. It seems random to Hood that Williams has an army and Littlejohn a ragtag clan. Not that any of it saves Williams in the end; he’s executed on Sept. 24.

As Hood prepares himself for the final battle, disaster strikes at home the night before he’s set to leave for Oklahoma: One of his kids intentionally floods the upstairs toilet while their father is downstairs making spaghetti. The sewage leaks into the light socket in the dining room , and when he goes to fix it, the reverend gets a face full of excrement. Littlejohn calls not long after.

“I just got baptized in shit!” Hood exclaims, after explaining the incident.

Littlejohn laughs darkly. “Well, you’re gonna get baptized in shit again this week!”

While Hood packs his bags for Oklahoma, Littlejohn heads to Death Watch, a cell not far from the chamber where the fluorescent lights never go out. He feels dead already, he tells Hood, even though Gov. Stitt could call off his execution any minute. It’s happened before in Oklahoma. Julius Jones was spared four hours before he was scheduled to die. Still, Littlejohn is basically in limbo, left to think back on better days — like when he got a Big Wheel for Christmas as a kid — and what he wanted his life to look like then. “I just wanted to have a good life,” he tells me during a brief phone call, before the line cuts out. “It didn’t matter what I was doing, as long as I was having a good life.”

The Wednesday before Littlejohn’s execution date, Hood goes into full-on activist mode. Early that morning he piles into a rented white SUV he’s dubbed the Priestmobile — piloted by a septuagenarian abolitionist with a lead foot — and heads to Oklahoma City, where a litany of press conferences await. As the vehicle careens by churches and weed dispensaries, Hood arranges an interview between NPR and Littlejohn, chuckling sadly at a billboard that reads: “When you die you will meet God.” Everything feels like a sign today.

Hood links up with Littlejohn’s family under the celestial dome of the capitol building, where he races Ceily in her wheelchair toward a presser with the Oklahoma Legislative Black Caucus, Littlejohn’s sister Augustina and niece Blessing trailing behind. There’s still hope here. Jones’ sister, Antoinette, is in attendance, and that seems like a good omen. Her brother lived, and so could Littlejohn. And so Hood and the family appeal to the press — and governor — in front of the news cameras. “I’m here to beg and plead for my brother’s life,” Augustina says, blinking tears into the bright lights as she clutches her mom’s hand. “To know Manual is to love Manual. He’s a big kid in a 52-year-old man’s body.”

On the inside, though, Hood’s hope is fading. When he stops to see one of the billboards Death Penalty Action purchased in support of Littlejohn near a roadside Burger King, he’s disheartened when the digital message flashes by in mere seconds. And when someone from that organization informs him that no one has printed out the petition he’s supposed to present to the governor in mere hours, he’s just pissed.

A pit stop at Office Depot later, and Hood speeds back to the capitol, just in time to do yet another presser underneath the painted dome along with a smattering of activists. And then it’s on to the governor’s office, where Hood hands a stack of more than 12,000 signatures in support of Littlejohn to a woman wearing red striped pants and a strained smile. The governor himself, though, doesn’t make an appearance. He has yet to make a decision, telling the press earlier that day that he “continues to prayerfully and carefully consider the facts, evidence, and recommendations.”

Through it all, Hood can only think of Littlejohn, who, just that morning, watched as officials measured his arms and calves for the execution. “They wanted to check my veins to see if they’re visible, to see if they got a good line to kill me with, I guess,” he tells NPR. “I have never been so scared in my life. To have somebody have your life in their hands and you can’t do nothing about it, it messes with a person. It messes with them and you are going to take it up to the last second.”

And Hood prays for Littlejohn, as he has his last meal (pizza, cheesecake, and a Coke), while Hood eats with Littlejohn’s family at a quirky Western-themed restaurant with photos of the Big Mac prison’s long-defunct rodeo on the wall. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks sing “don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” from the overhead speakers, as if he needs a reminder of the sleepless hours ahead.

‘Faith, Hope, and Love’ 

And so Hood’s back now at the prison gates, watching McAlester wake up. The first news outlets start arriving around 6 a.m., and Hood makes one last appeal to the governor via a local TV station: “My hope is that Gov. Stitt is mining his heart. You know, he just had a stent put in, so we know he’s got a good heart,” he quips, referring to a recent surgery. 

Augustina, Blessing, and other family members and supporters arrive not long after the sun comes up, gathering at the blockade prison officials put up to keep protesters out. Augustina seems shell-shocked, rubbing her hands on her pants and pacing, repeating, “I don’t know what to do with this pain.” Blessing bounces on the balls of her feet, telling anyone who will listen about her uncle. He loves clowns, she says — even has a tattoo of a big red-nosed bozo on his back. He’s inspired her to go back to school to become a public defender; he’s always believed in her. 

“When I seen him last weekend, he was telling me, ‘I’m still young. I got it,’” she recalls. “I’m looking at him. I’m like, ‘You are in a wheelchair.’ He’s all like, ‘I could lift my foot up.’ I tell you, it took him 10 minutes to lift that foot up, but he got it up.” He wanted to show them his “cute toes,” she says, laughing, before her face falls. “He’s old. He’s not a threat to society. He can barely lift his legs, he can barely move his arms.”

Meanwhile, Hood heads to a red brick prison building to wait for the shuttle to the death chamber with Littlejohn’s mom and daughter. Outside, more protesters and religious folks arrive, setting up for a vigil outside the blockade. As he makes small talk with prison officials, Hood fiddles with his Bible and bottle of anointing oil, repeating Corinthians 13 in his head, specifically the words “faith, hope, and love .” Still, he can’t help but think of Gov. Stitt, who, less than 30 minutes before the execution start time, has yet to weigh in. 

And that’s its own kind of torture — the waiting, the stress, the hope, the despair. And what for? Justice? An end to murder? An eye for an eye? According to the Death Penalty Information Center’s Maher, there’s no evidence that executions curb violent crime. “Even the strongest proponents of the use of the death penalty have abandoned the argument that it deters future crime, because every single study that’s been conducted has failed to provide any connection,” she says. “We use the death penalty because it is the strongest possible response to the most severe crimes. In other words, it is vengeance.”

What is certain, however, is the effect executions have on the inmate’s family. “They have the ultimate status of pariah,” says Frank Baumgartner, the death penalty expert. “It’s bad enough to have a loved one in prison, but to have a loved one on death row is that much worse.” Augustina and Blessing are proof of that, milling outside the prison walls, caught between madcap laughter and wails of pain — the polarities of grief.

As Hood heads through the succession of heavy metal doors toward the death chamber, it seems less and less likely that Stitt will come through. He walks slower, as if that will stop time. It’s about 9:45 a.m. when he reaches the door to the chamber, where a man in tactical gear and what looks like a black ninja mask waits for him. “How’s your family doing?” Hood asks him pointedly; he’s seen the guy before. He wants this man to know he sees him now. The man responds that he’s not interested in small talk, in a voice Hood will later describe as menacing; he imagines he practices it in the mirror. 

The masked man opens the door at nearly 10 a.m., and when Hood sees Littlejohn strapped to the gurney, his stomach bottoms out. And he’s not alone. “Oh, shit,” Littlejohn says sadly. Hood takes Littlejohn’s massive hand and the floodgates open, the big man crying fat tears that roll down his face to the gurney below. “I’m so sorry,” Hood says over and over, but Littlejohn just shakes his head. “You did good, Jeff,” he says. “I love you.”

Hood doesn’t have long to mourn, though — he launches into prayer, talking about sin and casting the first stone, and pulls out the oil to anoint Littlejohn’s head. A jokester to the end, Littlejohn cracks a smile. “Jeff, you done brought me some weed?” he asks, and in a truly bizarre moment, an official in the chamber laughs.

Littlejohn squeezes Hood’s hand as the curtain raises, so that Littlejohn’s family, the Meers clan, the press, and government officials can watch. Ceily cries when she sees her son, and Littlejohn tells her, “I love you.” Then the process begins: the IVs and needles, the drugs and straps. At Littlejohn’s side, Hood makes the sign of the cross over and over again, until the other man is just a shell. His time of death: 10:17 a.m. Outside, the news reaches his family. Augustina faints to the asphalt. Blessing falls to her knees and lets out a guttural scream. Later, Littlejohn’s death certificate will read, under manner of death, “homicide.”

The governor breaks his silence only after Littlejohn dies, telling the press: “A jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death. As a law-and-order governor, I have a hard time unilaterally overturning that decision.” His office did not return a request for comment from Rolling Stone.

Trending Stories

As Hood emerges from Big Mac, he feels outside of himself somehow — like his spirit is walking with all the men he’d seen die before — Anthony Sanchez, Kenneth Smith, Scott Eizember, and all the rest. Still, something is missing from his heart. “With all of my guys, I feel the same way,” he says. “I feel like I’m torn between Missouri’s execution chamber and Oklahoma, Texas, Alabama — a part of me is still in all of those spaces.”

The pain won’t end when Hood goes home — when Littlejohn’s ashes are buried in a plain metal box back in Kansas, where his family lives. Hood will dream about Littlejohn for weeks and months afterward — how, in the end, he couldn’t save him. But it’s Hood’s calling to walk through the valley of death, and his journey isn’t over yet.