YOU ARE A MURDERER: ESSAYS FOR EXECUTIONERS

You are a Murderer.

Essays for Executioners

Jeff Hood

• Paperback, hardback, audiobook & ebook versions of this short book are also available for purchase on Amazon.

Preface: Executioner: You Are a Murderer

You are a murderer.

I don’t care what they told you. I don’t care what you tell yourself when you’re trying to fall asleep. You killed somebody. You’ve maybe killed a lot of somebodies. The state gave you permission and you did it.

That’s murder.

I’ve been in the room with you. I’ve smelled what you’ve smelled. I’ve heard the sounds you’ve heard…the ones nobody warned you about, the ones you can’t describe to your wife. I was holding his hand while you were strapping down the other one. We were that close.

Then you walked out one door and I walked out another and I have no idea where you went. I feel like I never left.

I’m a priest. I’m also a witness. I’m also, if I’m honest, some kind of accomplice. I don’t know what I am. I just know I keep showing up and so do you and men keep dying and something is wrong with both of us for being there.

But your hands did the work. That’s a difference.

This book is for you. Not the lawyers. Not the governor. You. The one who actually kills people for a living and can’t say that out loud.

I wrote it because I think your soul is still in there somewhere. I think the part of you that flinches…and I’ve seen you flinch…that part can still hear the truth.

So here it is.

You are a murderer.

And you can stop.

I. The Demise of the Executioner

Death came for the executioner the way it comes for everyone.

He had spent decades watching others cross over. Forty-seven men and women. He had memorized their final breaths. He knew the exact second when life leaves the body…that moment when the eyes go somewhere else. He thought he understood it.

He didn’t understand anything.

The Chamber

He opened his eyes to a room he recognized. The chamber. The same pale green walls. The same fluorescent hum. The same gurney bolted to the floor.

He was strapped to it.

He could feel the leather on his wrists. He could smell the antiseptic and something else underneath it…that smell the cleaning crew could never get out. He used to think he was imagining it. Now he knew.

“No,” he whispered.

“Isn’t what?”

He turned his head and there was Marcus Williams. Execution number twenty-three. A Tuesday in October. They had trouble finding a vein that day. The executioner remembered standing there watching them dig. Dig and dig. Marcus never made a sound.

Orange jumpsuit. Shaved head. That tired look the dying get.

“Marcus. I was just doing my job.”

“I know.”

“The courts decided. The juries. The state. I just…”

“I know.”

Marcus sat down. Folded his hands the way he had when he prayed before they pushed the plunger. The executioner remembered that too. Watching this man pray for the men about to kill him.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Marcus said. “I need to ask you something.”

The executioner didn’t say anything.

“After me there were twenty-four more. I watched you do it twenty-four more times. Check the lines. Mix the chemicals. Give the nod. I watched you go home after. I watched you sit in your truck in the driveway for an hour before you could go inside.”

The executioner’s eyes went wet. He had forgotten anyone could see that.

“I watched you take a shower so hot it burned you. I watched you pour the drink. I watched you sit in front of the television not seeing anything.”

Marcus leaned close. His breath was cold.

“Why did you keep killing people?”

The executioner opened his mouth and nothing came out. All those words he had practiced. Lawful orders. The system. One small part. They had made so much sense when he was standing. They were nothing now.

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” Marcus said. “I didn’t think you did.”

He stood. Walked to the door. Stopped.

“Someone else wants to ask you.”

The Victim

She was younger than he remembered from the photos.

Rebecca Torres. Nineteen years old. Night shift at a gas station. Paying for nursing school. Marcus Williams shot her for forty-three dollars and a pack of cigarettes. She bled out on the floor next to the candy aisle. The Snickers were on sale.

The executioner had looked at her picture before every execution Marcus was on the calendar. He had needed her face to do it.

“Rebecca. I’m so sorry for what happened to you.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time. Just looked at him. Then:

“Why did you keep killing people?”

His chest caved.

“For you,” he said. “I did it for you. For justice…”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“He took your life.”

“And you took his. Then you took another one. And another. Forty-seven people. You put them through what I went through in that gas station and you did it in my name.”

He was crying now. The tears ran sideways into his ears. He couldn’t wipe them.

“I never wanted more death,” she said. “I wanted to live. I wanted to be a nurse. I wanted to hold people’s hands when they were scared and tell them it was going to be okay. I was twenty credits away.”

She stopped. Looked at the wall.

“I think about those twenty credits a lot.”

“I thought I was honoring you.”

“You were burying me. Every execution you buried me deeper. You made my death into a bottomless pit and you just kept throwing bodies in.”

She sat down.

“Did it bring me back?”

“No.”

“Did it help my mama?”

“No.”

“Did it stop the next one? The next robbery? The next girl working nights?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

He didn’t have an answer. He had never had an answer. He had just kept showing up.

The Forty-Seven

Then… The gurney was gone. The straps. The room.

He just sat there in the gray nothing.

They were there. All of them. Forty-seven. He could see their faces now. The ones who cried. The ones who screamed verses at him. The ones who went limp. The ones who looked at him and said thank you like he was doing them a favor. He had never understood that. He still didn’t.

One of them…number thirty-one, a woman named Darlene who had killed her husband with a hammer…she was standing closest. He remembered that she had begged for her life.

They weren’t angry. That was the thing. He almost wished they were.

They were just waiting. Waiting for him to walk toward them. To sit down. To finally see them as something other than what he had made them…problems to be solved with chemicals and silence.

He took a step.

It was the hardest thing he had ever done.

The Living

I don’t know what happens to the souls of executioners when they die.

I don’t know if there’s a room. A gurney with their name on it. A line of the dead waiting to ask questions that don’t have answers.

But I know the questions don’t wait.

They’re already here.

It Doesn’t Have to Happen

For every corrections officer who has walked into that room. For every one scheduled to walk in next month or next year. The questions are already here.

“Why do you keep killing people?”

You can answer now. In this life. Before the gray nothing. Before the faces.

You can just stop…and save your soul in the process.

II. I Watched You Kill Him: A Priest’s Plea to Executioners

Dear Executioner,

I have watched you work.

Eleven times now. Eleven men. Eleven deaths I stood close enough to touch.

I was the one holding his hand while you strapped the other one down. I was the one praying while you checked the lines. I was the one whispering scripture while you waited for the warden’s nod. We breathed the same air in that room. We heard the same last words. We watched the same body go still.

Then you walked out one door and I walked out another.

Where did you go? Home to your wife, your kids, your dog who don’t know what you do for a living? To a bar where nobody asks questions? To bed, where you stared at the ceiling until morning?

I went to a hotel room. I sat on the edge of the bed. I didn’t move for a long time.

This letter is for you.

Not the lawyers who argued the case. Not the judges who upheld the sentence. Not the governor who signed the warrant. You. The one who actually did it. The one whose hands touched his body. The one who made the killing real.

I’m not here to judge you. That’s not what this is. I’ve been in that room too many times to pretend I’m innocent.

Here’s what I can’t figure out: Am I a witness or an accomplice? When I hold his hand, does that comfort him or does it make the whole thing easier for the state? When I pray over his body, am I resisting the violence or blessing it?

I don’t know. I’ve asked God. I’ve asked myself. I haven’t gotten an answer that lets me sleep at night.

So, I’m not coming at you from some high place. I’m down here in the dirt with you. We’re both covered in the same blood.

But your hands did the work. My hands just held on. That’s a difference. I don’t know how big a difference, but it’s something.

What is Happening to Your Soul?

You can call it conscience if you want. Call it your psyche. Call it whatever you need to call it. But you know there’s something inside you that watches what you do and remembers. Something that doesn’t forget. Something that wakes you up at 3 a.m. with questions you can’t answer.

The state doesn’t care about that something. The state just needs a body to do the job. When you’re used up…when the nightmares get too bad or the drinking gets out of control or your wife finally leaves…they’ll find another body. You’re replaceable. Your soul isn’t their problem.

But it’s your problem. It’s going to be your problem for the rest of your life…and then some.

I’ve talked to men and women who did what you do. Twenty, thirty executions. They seemed fine for years. Professionals. Did the job, went home, lived their lives. Then something cracked. A nightmare that wouldn’t stop. A trigger they couldn’t explain…the hiss of compressed air, the beep of a heart monitor, the smell of antiseptic. Suddenly, they couldn’t function. Couldn’t be in the same room with their kids. Couldn’t feel anything except numb or terrified, nothing in between.

One man told me he started dreaming about the chamber. Not the executions…just the room. Empty. Silent. Waiting. He’d wake up shaking and couldn’t explain why an empty room scared him more than anything he’d ever seen.

But his body knew. His soul knew. The room was never empty. The ghosts were in there, waiting for him.

I carry ghosts too. Eleven of them. They’re with me right now, while I write this.

How many are you carrying?

Every Detail of the Room Sticks with You

You know it better than I do.

You know which door sticks. Which light buzzes. How many steps from the hall to the gurney. Where to stand so you’re not in the way. You’ve walked that room so many times your body could do it blind.

I’ve been in eleven times. That’s nothing compared to you. But eleven times is enough.

The smell hits first. That hospital smell, but wrong somehow. Hospitals are for healing. This room is for killing. Your body knows the difference even before your mind catches up. Something tightens in your chest. Something old. Something familiar.

The light is too bright. Fluorescent. No shadows. Nothing soft. Every detail exposed, documented, witnessed. It’s the light they use on things that are already dead.

And there in the middle: the gurney. Medical equipment turned into a killing machine. The straps worn smooth from all the bodies that have been held down. The padding is so thin. Comfort isn’t the point.

The shape of it…arms out, chest up, head back…it looks like a cross. Doesn’t it? The state would never admit that, but I’ve stood next to enough of them to see it. We lay a man down like a sacrifice. Everyone in the room becomes part of the ritual.

Why Do You Hesitate?

I’ve seen you hesitate.

Not much. A fraction of a second. A pause before tightening a strap. A breath before giving the nod. It’s small. Nobody else notices. But I’ve been watching.

That hesitation is your conscience trying to speak. That tiny pause is your soul screaming stop before your training shuts it down.

The state doesn’t train you to hesitate. The state trains you to perform. Execute…that’s the word, isn’t it? Same word for killing a man and for completing a task. That’s not an accident. They want you to think of it as a task. A procedure. Something you do, not something you become.

But you’re not a machine. Machines don’t hesitate.

Are you still human?

I’m asking seriously. Not as an insult. As a genuine question. After all the executions you’ve participated in, is there still a person inside the uniform? Is there still a soul under the protocol?

I believe there is. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the crack in the mask. I’ve seen the hesitation. That’s why I’m writing this.

How Do You Carry the Room?

The room doesn’t stay in the prison.

You walk out. You drive home. You take off the uniform. You shower. You eat dinner. You watch TV. You go through all the motions of normal life.

But the room comes with you.

It’s in the smell that won’t wash off. In the hands that remember what they did. In the eyes that saw things most people will never see.

It comes with me too. The smell of antiseptic triggers it. The buzz of fluorescent lights. Someone struggling to breathe. Ordinary things that aren’t ordinary anymore because they’ve been poisoned by association with death.

Eleven executions, and I’m the witness. You’re the participant. I don’t know which of us carries the heavier weight. But we’re both carrying something that’s going to take years off our lives.

The room follows us. The room waits for us in our sleep. The room never forgets what we did there, even when we try to.

The Damage Radiates Outward

You probably think the damage is contained. You probably think it’s just you and the condemned. The man dies, you go home, the circle closes.

It doesn’t work that way.

There are other people in that witness room. They watch what you do. And what you do breaks them too.

The victim’s family came for closure. That’s what the state promised them. That’s what everybody told them. Watch him die and you’ll finally be able to heal. Watch him die and the nightmare will be over. Watch him die and you can move on.

They lied to them too.

I’ve talked to victim’s families after executions. Not all of them. But enough. The closure doesn’t come. The healing doesn’t happen. Instead, they’ve added a new trauma to the old one. Now they’ve watched a man die. Now they’ve got his face in their heads alongside the face of the person they lost.

The state uses the grief of victim’s families to justify what you do. And then the state leaves them to deal with their new grief on their own.

You helped do that to them. You didn’t mean to. You were just doing your job. But she’s wounded, and you’re the weapon that wounded her.

On the other side of the glass is another family. The condemned man’s mother. His children. His wife. His sister. People who love him, even though they know what he did. People who are about to watch the state kill someone they love.

Nobody talks about them. Nobody cares about their grief. The state decided their person forfeited the right to be mourned when he committed his crime. But grief doesn’t follow the state’s rules. Love doesn’t check the legal record before it decides to break your heart.

I’ve sat with those families. I’ve prayed with them. I’ve held their hands in the hours before while they waited for the state to kill their son, their father, their brother.

Then I’ve watched them watch you do it.

The mother cries out. The children press their faces to the glass. The wife collapses. And you’re on the other side, doing your job, following procedure, making it happen.

You helped do that to them.

The Corruption of the State

Here’s something you probably haven’t thought about: you’re corrupting the state you work for.

I don’t mean corruption like bribes and scandals. I mean something deeper. Every time you participate in an execution, you help stain the soul of the state itself.

The state’s whole claim to legitimacy rests on being different from the criminals it punishes. The murderer kills out of rage or greed or hatred. The state…supposedly…acts out of justice and reason. The murderer is lawless. The state is lawful. That’s the story anyway.

But when the state kills, the distinction collapses. The state does exactly what the murderer did…takes a human life…and dresses it up in procedure and paperwork. The state becomes what it claims to condemn.

And you’re the one who makes it real. You’re the point where the state’s violence stops being abstract and becomes concrete. Without your hands, the execution can’t happen. You are the mechanism through which the state corrupts itself.

Think about what the state is teaching when it executes. It’s teaching that some problems can only be solved by killing. It’s teaching that violence is an acceptable answer when you have enough authority behind it. It’s teaching that certain people are disposable…that there’s a category of human being who can be erased.

The state stands up and says: Killing is wrong. Don’t do it. Then the state straps a man to a gurney and kills him.

Studies show the death penalty doesn’t deter crime. Of course it doesn’t. The state is modeling exactly what it claims to prohibit. It’s teaching violence by example.

You’re the teacher. Every time you participate, you’re giving the lesson. You’re showing the world that killing can be organized, scheduled, bureaucratized, made acceptable. You’re demonstrating that with enough paperwork and protocol, ending a human life is just another day at work.

The Image of God

I’m a priest. You probably figured that out. So, I’m going to talk about God now. If that’s not your thing, you can skip ahead. But I think you should hear this.

I believe every human being is made in the image of God.

You don’t have to believe that. But the idea is older than Christianity. It goes back to the first pages of Genesis. Every person carries something sacred inside them. Not because of what they’ve done or haven’t done. Because of what they are. Human.

That image doesn’t get erased by crime. The man on the gurney, whatever he did…and some of them did terrible things…is still a bearer of the divine image. His humanity doesn’t disappear because a jury said so. His sacred worth doesn’t get cancelled by a death warrant.

When you kill him, you destroy an icon of God.

I don’t say that to hurt you. I say it because you need to understand what you’re being asked to do. The state calls it justice. I call it desecration. You’re breaking something sacred. You’re shattering an image of the divine.

And here’s the thing about breaking sacred images: you can’t do it without breaking something in yourself.

You bear the same image. The same God who made him made you. The same sacred worth that makes his life precious makes your life precious.

When you participate in his destruction, you participate in your own diminishment. When you shatter the image of God in him, you fracture it in yourself.

This isn’t about punishment. God isn’t keeping score to hit you with later. It’s about the nature of the act itself. Killing harms the killer. It has to. You can’t destroy another person’s humanity without destroying some of your own.

That’s what I mean when I talk about your soul. That’s what’s at stake. Not just your mental health, not just your relationships, not just your sleep. Your fundamental self. The part of you that makes you human. The image of God that you carry.

The state is taking it from you, execution by execution. And when it’s gone…when the image is too damaged to recognize…what will be left?

The Cross

People forget that. They put crosses on their walls and around their necks like it’s a nice decoration. But the cross was a method of execution. Rome’s death penalty. Jesus was a condemned man, killed by the government using legal procedures.

Which means Christianity was founded by someone who was strapped down and killed, just like the men on your gurneys. The God I serve was executed. The God I pray to knows what it feels like to have the state’s hands on his body.

When I stand next to a condemned man, I see Christ. When I hold his hand, I’m holding the hand of my savior. Matthew 25…’whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me.’

What does that make you?

I’m not trying to damn you. Grace extends to everyone, even people whose hands are red with blood. But the act is what it is. When you kill the condemned, you’re doing something to Christ. You’re standing in the same place of the soldiers at Golgotha that crucified Jesus.

That should matter. Even if you’re not religious. Even if you think this is all mythology. The story shapes our culture, shapes our conscience, shapes what we think justice means. And in that story, God takes the side of the executed. Not the executioner.

You Can Stop

You can stop.

I know it doesn’t feel that way. I know there are bills to pay and a pension to protect. I know there’s pressure from above and silence from the people around you. I know the system is designed to make you feel like you don’t have a choice.

But you do have a choice. You’ve always had a choice. The choice is hard…but it exists.

You can refuse.

I’m not going to pretend it won’t cost you. It might cost you your job. It might cost you friendships. It might cost you the career you’ve built. Those are real costs, and I don’t minimize them.

But what’s the alternative? Keep going until you break? Keep adding ghosts until they crowd out everything else? Keep becoming someone your children won’t recognize, your wife can’t reach, you can’t find in the mirror?

The job isn’t worth your soul. Nothing is.

Practical Steps

In some states, you have the right to refuse assignments that violate your conscience. The right exists on paper even if nobody talks about it. Look into it. Talk to a lawyer. Find out what protections exist.

Document your beliefs. Write them down. Create a record. If you’re going to refuse, make it clear that you’re refusing on principle, not on whim. That matters legally and it matters morally.

Find allies. You’re not the only one who feels this way. There are others…I promise you there are others…who carry the same doubts, the same horror, the same weight. They’re afraid to speak too. But if you find each other, you might find the courage to speak together.

And if you can’t refuse yet…if the circumstances won’t allow it…then start with the small resistances. Look him in the eye. Acknowledge his humanity even if you can’t say it out loud. Refuse to participate in the jokes, the detachment, the pretending that what you’re doing is normal. Keep your soul awake even while your hands do the work.

But know that the small resistances aren’t enough. Eventually, you have to choose. You have to say no. You have to walk away.

The Path to Healing

If you’ve already participated…if you’ve already been in that room, already done the work, already carry the ghosts…then you need healing. Not just quitting. Healing.

That starts with confession. Not to a court…I’m not talking about legal confession. I’m talking about telling the truth about what you’ve done to someone who can hear it without judgment. A therapist. A priest. A friend. Someone.

The silence is killing you. The secret is rotting inside you. You need to speak it out loud. You need to name what you’ve done and feel the weight of it and let someone else help you carry it.

Then grief. You’ve lost something. You’ve lost the person you were before. You’ve lost your innocence, your wholeness, your clean conscience. Those losses are real and they deserve to be mourned.

And finally, amends. Not just apologizing to the dead. But living differently. Using what you’ve learned to help others. Speaking out. Joining the fight to end the thing that damaged you.

Some of the strongest voices against the death penalty are former executioners. They know what nobody else knows. Their testimony carries a weight no outsider can match. Your suffering can become a gift if you let it.

You Are Not Alone

You’re not alone.

It feels that way. The system is designed to make it feel that way. Keep the executioners isolated, silent, ashamed. Don’t let them talk to each other. Don’t let them talk to anyone. Silence protects the system.

But there are others. People who have done what you’ve done and lived to tell the truth about it. People who found their way out. People who are walking the same path you’re walking, looking for the same light.

Find them. Read their stories. Listen to their voices. Let them show you that transformation is possible, that the damage isn’t permanent, that a different life exists on the other side of refusal.

There are also people working to end the death penalty. Lawyers, activists, ministers, organizers. They want to help you. They see you not as the enemy but as another victim of the system. They have resources. They have experience. They have solidarity to offer.

And there are people like me. Spiritual advisors who have stood in that room. We know what you’ve seen. We know what it costs. We don’t condemn you for it because we carry our own guilt, our own questions, our own weight.

Reach out. Tell your story. Let someone else help you carry it. The isolation is the system’s tool for keeping you trapped. Connection is how you break free.

Set It Down

The warrant is not holy writ.

The warden’s order is not the voice of God.

The chain of command does not dissolve your responsibility.

You are not a machine.

You are a human being. You were made in the image of God. You have a conscience that speaks to you, even now, even after everything. You have the capacity to choose.

Choose differently.

Choose to listen to the voice that has been whispering “no” since the first time you walked into that room. Choose to honor the hesitation you’ve learned to suppress. Choose to be something other than what the state has made you.

I know what it will cost you. I know you’ll lose things. But you’ve already lost things. You’ve lost pieces of your soul. You’ve lost the ability to sleep through the night. You’ve lost the person you were before.

What do you have left to lose that matters more than what you’ll gain?

You’ll gain your humanity back. Your integrity. Your capacity to look in the mirror without flinching. You’ll gain the chance to become someone your children can be proud of, someone you can be proud of.

You’ll gain your soul.

I’ve been in that room with you. I’ve breathed the same air. I’ve heard the same final breaths. I’ve watched the same bodies go still.

We’re bound together by what we’ve witnessed and what we’ve done. We can’t undo it. We can’t pretend it didn’t happen. We’ll carry it for the rest of our lives.

But we can choose what comes next. We can choose to stay in the darkness or walk toward the light. We can choose to keep participating or finally refuse.

I’ve made my choice. I’ll keep entering that room, keep holding hands, keep praying, keep witnessing. I’m not sure it’s the right choice. I’m not sure there is a right choice. But it’s my choice to love those that society has chosen to throw away, and I’ll live with it.

Now you have to make yours.

The warrant is in your hands. You can carry it into that room one more time. You can do what the state tells you to do. You can kill. You can add another ghost to the ones you’re already carrying.

Or you can set it down and walk away.

Your soul is worth more than the state will ever pay you for it.

 

-JH.

III. To Those Who Carry Out Nitrogen Executions: A Warning

You know what you did.

I don’t care what they called it. Hypoxia. Protocol. Humane alternative. You were in that room. You watched a man suffocate. You watched him fight for air that wasn’t there. You watched the most basic terror a body can know…the lungs working and working and finding nothing.

You know what that looked like.

The state needed you to call it something else. They needed you to believe the paperwork made it different. That the legality of the thing cleaned it somehow. But legal has never meant right. Lawful has never meant good. Slavery was legal. The ovens were legal. Men in uniforms have always found ways to make murder administrative.

I’ve been in execution chambers. I’ve stood where you’ve stood. I’ve watched men die by the state’s hand while everyone pretended it was justice. So I’m not speaking from some distant place. I’m telling you what I know in my own body: what happens in that room is killing, and the mask you wear…the professional detachment, the clinical language…that mask is how you survive doing something that should be unsurvivable.

But you remember it, don’t you?

You remember fitting that mask over his face. Your hands on the straps. Tightening. Checking the seal. You were close enough to see his eyes. Close enough to hear him breathing…those last breaths that were still real breaths, still had oxygen in them. You did that. Not the state. Not the warden. Not the governor who signed the paper. You. Your hands.

And then the valve opened and you watched him die.

I don’t know what they told you it would look like. Peaceful, probably. Quick. They always say that. But that’s not what you saw, is it? You saw his body fight. You saw the gasping…not the gentle fading they promised but the deep, wrenching, animal gasping of a body that knows it’s being killed. You saw him convulse against the straps. You saw his back arch. You saw his hands clench into fists and you stood there because the protocol said stand there. Because stopping would mean admitting what was happening. Because the machine was already moving and you were part of the machine.

It took too long. They never tell you exactly how long it takes.

The witnesses saw the mask fog up. They heard sounds…god, the sounds…that no training manual prepared anyone for. And still you stood there. Still you waited. Still you did nothing while a man’s body begged to live and you watched him die by inches.

That’s what your hands did. That’s the thing you carry now.

No signature transfers that. No court ruling. No chain of command. The mask didn’t seal itself. You sealed it. The valve didn’t turn itself. Someone turned it. This happened because human hands made it happen, and those hands were yours.

I know what you told yourself. I know because it’s what they all tell themselves. I’m just doing my job. I’m just following orders. The responsibility is somewhere else…up the chain, in the system, anywhere but here in my own chest.

But you know where that logic leads. History is full of people who followed orders. They have their own graveyards. Their own tribunals. Their own children who grew up ashamed of their names.

I’m not saying you’re a Nazi. I’m not saying this is the Holocaust. I’m saying the structure is the same. The ordinary people doing extraordinary evil because someone handed them a checklist. The paperwork that makes murder feel like procedure. The language…processing, protocol, humane…that exists for no reason except to stop you from seeing what you’re actually doing.

Every atrocity has needed that. The technical language. The bureaucratic distance. The permission structure that lets normal people do abnormal things and go home after and eat dinner and kiss their kids and sleep. That’s not a side effect. That’s the whole design. That’s how it works. That’s how it has always worked.

You were part of that design.

And the people who built it don’t care about you. The state will let you carry this alone. When the nightmares come…and they will…no legislator will sit with you. When you see his face in some stranger on the street, no warden will be there. You will carry the weight of what happened in that room for the rest of your life, and the system that asked you to do it will have moved on to the next one.

This will not leave you. I need you to hear that. It will not leave you.

I’ve watched men die. I’ve held their hands while the poison went in. I’ve prayed with them and I’ve prayed for the people who killed them and I’m telling you…what you did in that room, it lives in you now. It has carved out a space. And you have to decide what to do with that space.

You can let it fester. You can keep telling yourself the lie…that you were just the instrument, that the responsibility lived elsewhere, that the mask you wore made you someone other than who you are.

Or you can refuse.

Not the past. The past is done. Your hands did what they did and that’s the truth of it.

But the next one. The next man they strap to that table. The next mask. The next valve. You can say no. You can say, I’ve done this thing and I won’t do it again. I won’t suffocate another human being so the state can call it justice.

That matters. Maybe it doesn’t fix what happened. Maybe it doesn’t balance any scales. But it stops the wound from spreading. It breaks something in the machine. It tells the truth that all this depends on…that this only happens because people like you agree to do it. And when you stop agreeing, it stops.

One day they’ll look back on this the way we look back on the chair, the gas chamber, the hanging. Another innovation in killing that we convinced ourselves was humane until we couldn’t pretend anymore. And when that day comes, the question won’t be whether it was legal.

The question will be whether you stopped it.

You still can.

IV. What the Child Learns

The child grows up believing their parent works a job that cannot be described. Not secret exactly…just undefined. The parent leaves early, comes home tired, carries a silence that feels heavier than exhaustion. When asked, the answer is always the same: I work for the state. That phrase becomes a wall. It explains everything and nothing.

Children are experts at filling in gaps. They imagine bureaucracies, offices with bad coffee, long meetings about things that don’t matter. They learn not to ask too many questions, because every question makes the room colder. Love teaches them restraint before it teaches them truth.

The truth arrives later, not all at once. It arrives sideways…in a newspaper article left open on the table, in a protest on the evening news, in a word overheard and not meant for them: execution. At first, it doesn’t connect. Execution is an abstraction. A policy. A headline. Something done by the system, not by a person who packed lunches and attended school plays.

But systems are made of hands.

The child grows older and begins to understand that the state never kills anyone on its own. The state requires bodies…people who show up, follow procedures, press buttons, sign forms, watch the moment when a human being stops being alive. And then the child realizes: my parent was there.

This knowledge doesn’t come with clarity. It comes with nausea. With the slow, sick understanding that love and death have shared the same house.

How do you explain this to yourself, let alone to others? How do you reconcile bedtime stories with death warrants? The child wants to believe there must have been distance…surely their parent wasn’t that close. Surely, they didn’t see faces, didn’t hear last words, didn’t feel the air change when it was over. Surely, there was a way to do this job without carrying it home.

But silence is an answer. The parent never talks about work. Never names it. Never explains. And the child eventually understands that this silence is not neutrality…it is weight bearing silence. Silence that holds something terrible in place.

I remember a conversation I once had with a woman in Texas who worked in executions. She told me she would never tell her family what she did. Not her parents. Not her siblings. Maybe not even her children. “They wouldn’t understand,” she said. But what she meant was something sharper: I can’t survive their knowing.

That kind of secrecy is not about privacy. It is about fracture. It is about the fear that if the truth enters the room, love will have to choose a side.

For the child, this creates a second execution…one that happens slowly, over years. It is the execution of certainty. Of moral simplicity. Of the belief that the people who raised you stand clearly on the side of life. The child is forced to learn an adult lesson too early: that good people can participate in terrible things, and that love does not protect anyone from moral injury.

Some children defend their parent fiercely. They learn the language of necessity: someone has to do it, they were just following the law, it would happen anyway. These phrases become emotional armor. Other children reject their parent outright, unable to hold love and complicity in the same heart. Most live somewhere in between, carrying a quiet, grinding dissonance that never resolves.

What is hardest is not the act itself, but the inheritance. The child did not choose this role, yet it shapes them. They grow up fluent in euphemism, skilled at avoiding questions, attuned to the cost of telling the truth. They learn that there are things a family cannot survive saying out loud.

And yet, the question remains: How could you explain it?

Perhaps you can’t…not fully. Perhaps the most honest explanation is not a justification, but a confession: I was afraid to stop. I was afraid to refuse. I was afraid of what would happen if I said no. That explanation would not absolve, but it would at least tell the truth.

Because what children need is not a clean story. They need a real one.

They need to know whether the parent ever questioned what they were doing. Whether the parent ever felt haunted. Whether the parent ever wanted out. Whether they understood that the job didn’t end at the prison gates…that it followed them home, into their child’s future.

In the end, the child grows up carrying a terrible clarity: executions do not end with the dead. They ripple outward…into families, into memories, into the next generation. The state may call it justice. The paperwork may call it closure. But the child knows better.

They know that what was done in secret still demands to be answered for. And that one day, whether the parent speaks or not, the truth will have to be faced…not as policy, but as inheritance.

V. How Do You Sleep at Night?

How do you sleep at night?

I don’t mean that as a slogan or a protest chant. I mean it literally. I mean the hours after you leave the chamber, after the paperwork is signed, after the witnesses are escorted out, after the body is declared no longer a problem. I mean the drive home, the shower, the quiet. I mean the moment when no one is watching you do your job anymore.

How do you sleep knowing you didn’t just work that day…you ended someone’s existence?

You will say you didn’t decide anything. You will say the law decided. The court decided. The jury decided. The governor decided. You will say you are just one small piece of a large machine. That is always the first lie executioners tell themselves: I am not the hand, I am only the mechanism.

But mechanisms still require hands.

Someone straps the body down. Someone checks the restraints. Someone watches the chest rise and fall and knows exactly when it stops. Someone stands there long enough to be certain. That someone is you. The state does not kill people in the abstract. It kills them through human beings willing to be present.

So, I’m asking again: how do you sleep at night?

Do you replay it? The stillness after the final breath? The way the room changes when death arrives…not dramatically, not with thunder, but with a flat, unmistakable absence? Or do you work very hard not to remember faces, not to remember names, not to remember last words?

Because last words have a way of following people home.

You may tell yourself the person deserved it. You may catalogue their crimes like a shield. You may rehearse the language you were given…justice served, sentence carried out, closure provided. But none of that changes the simplest truth: you watched a living human being die because you showed up and did what you were told.

And you didn’t have to.

That’s the part you avoid. That’s the part that rattles around in the dark. You could have refused. You could have transferred. You could have said no. People do it every day in other jobs, other systems, other moments of moral crisis. But refusal costs something…status, stability, identity…and you decided that cost was too high.

So instead, you let someone else pay with their life.

How do you sleep at night knowing your children…if you have them…may one day learn what you did? Knowing they may have to reconcile birthday parties and bedtime stories with the fact that their parent participated in killing? Knowing you have forced them into a moral inheritance they never asked for?

I once spoke to a man who worked in executions who said she would never tell her family. Not ever. That wasn’t discretion. That was fear. Fear that the truth would break something essential. Fear that love might not survive full disclosure.

What does it say about a job when it cannot be spoken out loud in the place you are supposed to be most known?

You may say you compartmentalize. You may say you pray. You may say you drink. You may say you don’t think about it anymore. But the body remembers what the mouth refuses to say. Moral injury doesn’t announce itself…it leaks. Into your sleep. Into your relationships. Into the way you flinch at certain sounds, certain silences.

You didn’t just witness death. You rehearsed it. Over and over. You learned how to make it orderly. Predictable. Professional. That is not nothing. That changes a person.

And still…you sleep.

That may be the most unsettling part of all.

Because if you can sleep, it means you have found a way to live with it. You have learned how to normalize the irreversible. You have trained yourself to coexist with an act that cannot be undone. That is not strength. That is accommodation to violence.

So here is the question beneath the question:

At what point did you decide that being able to sleep mattered more than being able to say, this is wrong?

The world has always depended on people like you…people willing to make cruelty function smoothly, quietly, efficiently. History is full of them. They are rarely monsters. They are almost always ordinary. They go home. They eat dinner. They sleep.

And that is precisely the problem.

Because every system of killing depends on someone who can lie down afterward and call it rest.

So I will ask one last time, not as accusation but as invitation:

How do you sleep at night…and what would it take for you to finally stay awake?

VI. Your Hands Have Blood on Them

Your hands have blood on them.

You can wash them as many times as you want. You can scrub until the skin cracks. You can tell yourself it was clean, clinical, legal. You can insist no blade touched flesh, no trigger was pulled, no violence really happened. But blood does not care about your explanations.

It knows who was there.

You were there.

You can say the state did it. You can say the court did it. You can say the law required it. But laws do not lift bodies. Courts do not fasten straps. The state does not watch a chest stop moving. People do. And you are one of them.

Your hands have blood on them because you agreed to be present when someone was killed and you did not stop it.

You may never have touched the body. That is your favorite defense. I didn’t inject anything. I didn’t flip the switch. I didn’t give the signal. But proximity is participation. Witnessing without resistance is consent. Standing in the room while death is delivered is not neutrality…it is alignment.

You lent your body to the act.

You may tell yourself the person deserved it. That they were dangerous. That they were evil. That the world is better without them. That story is older than history, and it has always been told by people with blood on their hands. It is the story that makes killing survivable for the killer.

But deserving does not erase killing. Evil does not absolve you. And justice does not require your silence, your compliance, your steady breathing while another human being takes their last.

You want credit for following orders. For doing your job well. For keeping things calm, orderly, professional. But professionalism does not sanctify violence. It only makes it easier to repeat.

That’s why your hands shake sometimes when you don’t expect them to. That’s why you avoid certain conversations. That’s why you don’t tell your family what you do. You know…whether you admit it or not…that if you said it plainly, it would sound the way it actually is.

I help kill people.

So, you speak in euphemisms. Carry out a sentence. Perform a procedure. Ensure compliance. Language becomes your gloves. Thick. Sanitized. Designed to keep you from feeling what you are touching.

But blood gets through gloves.

It gets into memory. Into dreams. Into the spaces where excuses don’t reach.

You may think time dilutes responsibility. That years will soften the truth. That eventually it will feel like something you once did, long ago, under different circumstances, as a different person. But blood does not age out. It does not fade into abstraction. It waits.

And one day…maybe when a child asks you a question you can’t dodge, maybe when a name surfaces uninvited, maybe when you are alone in a quiet room…it will be there again, undeniable.

Not screaming. Not accusing.

Just present.

Your hands have blood on them not because you are uniquely cruel, but because you chose comfort over conscience. Stability over refusal. Sleep over resistance. You chose to remain useful to a system that kills and calls it order.

The truth is not that you are a monster.

The truth is worse.

The truth is that you are ordinary…and ordinary people make killing possible.

You can keep pretending your hands are clean. You can keep telling yourself the blood belongs to someone else. But nothing you say will change the fact that when the moment came, you were there, and someone else was not alive afterward.

That is what blood means.

And it will stay on your hands until you decide…finally…to stop lending them to death.

VII. The Only Salvation

There Is No Way to Wash It Off

There’s no way to wash it off.

That is the lie you’re still telling yourself…that somewhere there is enough water, enough soap, enough time. That if you keep your hands busy, if you keep your language clean, if you keep calling it procedure instead of killing, the stain will eventually lift.

It won’t.

Blood does not behave like dirt. Dirt comes from outside you. Blood implicates. Blood says you were there when a life ended and you did not leave. Blood binds memory to flesh. It does not rinse away. It soaks in.

You learned early how to wash your hands. Every execution teaches you the ritual again. Gloves off. Sink on. Scrub. Dry. Walk away. The choreography is meant to tell you a story: this is finished. But what you are really doing is practicing denial with your body.

Because the act didn’t end in the chamber.

You can’t wash off the moment when the breathing changed. You can’t wash off the silence that followed. You can’t wash off the knowledge that nothing you did afterward mattered, because the only thing that mattered had already happened and could not be reversed.

You were part of that irreversibility.

You want absolution without confession. You want innocence without refusal. You want the benefits of obedience without the cost of responsibility. Washing your hands is how you rehearse that fantasy…over and over, hoping repetition will turn it into truth.

But it never does.

That’s why you avoid mirrors on certain days. That’s why you tense up when someone says the word execution too plainly. That’s why you keep your work unnamed in your own home. You know that if it were spoken honestly, it would stick. You know there is no polite way to say, I help kill people for the state.

So, you don’t say it.

Instead, you wash.

You tell yourself the blood isn’t really blood. That it’s metaphorical. That nothing touched you directly. That you were just nearby. That proximity isn’t guilt. That presence isn’t participation. That standing in the room while someone dies doesn’t mark you.

But the body doesn’t believe that story.

The body remembers being there. It remembers the waiting. It remembers the watching. It remembers the moment when the room shifted and you knew…without being told…that it was over. That memory lives somewhere no sink can reach.

There is no way to wash off what you agreed to normalize.

You did not invent the system. But you sustained it. You did not write the sentence. But you made it real. You did not decide who would die. But you ensured that death happened smoothly, efficiently, without disruption. That is not nothing. That is not clean.

History is full of people who washed their hands and went home. They told themselves the same things you tell yourself. They insisted the blood belonged to someone else. They slept. They aged. They died. And the stain outlived them.

Because blood does not require your acknowledgment to be true.

You can keep washing. You can keep insisting. You can keep performing innocence until it feels almost natural. But none of it will change the simplest fact: someone else is gone from the world because you were willing to be present and compliant.

There is no way to wash that off.

The only honest choice left is not how hard you scrub, but whether you will continue to offer your hands at all

Turning Around

The only salvation is turning around.

Not explaining. Not justifying. Not refining the story you tell yourself so you can keep going. Turning around means stopping mid stride, mid career, mid identity…and admitting that the road you are on only leads deeper into blood you cannot wash away.

There is no salvation in doing it better.

There is no salvation in doing it calmly.

There is no salvation in doing it legally.

Salvation does not come from perfect procedure. It comes from refusal.

You have spent years moving forward…forward into the chamber, forward into routine, forward into a role that asks you to make death ordinary. Forward motion is what the system rewards. Forward motion is what keeps the machine smooth. Every step you take without resistance tells the system: this is acceptable.

Turning around is the one thing it cannot absorb.

To turn around is to break the spell that says inevitability equals innocence. It is to say, out loud if necessary, I will not be the hands anymore. Not because you are pure. Not because you are unmarked. But because you finally understand that continuing is its own confession.

Turning around will cost you. That is why so few do it. It may cost you your job, your status, your certainty, the thin respectability you have built around your silence. It may cost you friendships that only exist because you never asked hard questions together. It may cost you the story you tell your children about who you are.

But continuing costs more.

Continuing costs you the rest of your moral life. It costs you the ability to look honestly at what you have done. It costs you the chance to say, someday, I stopped. That sentence…simple, unfinished…is the only thing that interrupts the stain.

Turning around does not erase the past. Nothing does. The blood does not lift. The names do not disappear. The nights do not magically become quiet. Salvation is not amnesia. Salvation is truth with consequences.

It is standing in the full knowledge of what you participated in and deciding not to add another body to that ledger.

You may tell yourself it’s too late. That you’ve gone too far. That after a certain point, stopping is meaningless. That is another lie the system teaches you so it can keep using you. As long as you believe it’s too late, you will never test the possibility of refusal.

But the line is always now.

Every execution you do not participate in matters. Every time you remove your body from the process, the system loses a piece of its camouflage. Killing becomes harder when people stop lending themselves to it.

Turning around is not dramatic. It will not look heroic. It may look like resignation, transfer, refusal, silence where obedience used to be. It may look like finally telling the truth without demanding forgiveness in return.

That is the shape salvation takes in a world like this: not cleansing, not closure, but interruption.

You cannot undo what you have done.

You cannot wash it off.

You cannot make it clean.

But you can stop.

And stopping…at last, at cost, without illusion…that is the only salvation there is.

VIII. A Final Word to the Executioner

I have said hard things in this book. Things that may have made you angry. Things that may have made you defensive. Things that may have made you want to throw these pages across the room and never pick them up again.

But I hope you’re still here. I hope something in these words has stayed with you.

Because everything I have written comes from a single belief: you are still reachable. Your soul has not been permanently destroyed. The part of you that hesitates, that questions, that lies awake at night…that part is still alive. And as long as it’s alive, there is still hope.

I did not write this book to condemn you. Condemnation is easy. Condemnation costs me nothing. I wrote this book because I believe you can change. I believe you can choose differently. I believe that the person you were before you walked into that chamber for the first time is still somewhere inside you, waiting to be remembered.

The state has told you a story about yourself. It has told you that you are a professional. That you are necessary. That you are serving justice. That you are doing what has to be done. The state has given you a uniform, a title, a role to play. And playing that role has become easier over time. The first execution was probably the hardest. After that, it got smoother. More routine. More bearable.

That’s how the state wants it. The state needs you to believe that what you do is normal. Because if you ever stopped believing that…if you ever saw what you were really doing…you might stop. And if you stopped, others might stop too. And if enough people stopped, the whole machinery of death would grind to a halt.

That’s why your refusal matters more than you know.

You are not just one person making one choice. You are a crack in the foundation. You are proof that the system can be resisted from the inside. You are a witness to the truth that the state cannot kill without human hands…and human hands can choose to stop.

I don’t know what will happen if you refuse. I can’t promise it will be easy. I can’t promise your colleagues will understand. I can’t promise your supervisor won’t punish you. I can’t promise anything except this: you will be able to live with yourself. You will be able to look at your hands and know they are no longer instruments of death.

That has to be worth something. That has to be worth more than a pension, more than a job title, more than the approval of people who have never been in that room.

I think about the people I have watched die. I think about their faces, their last words, the way their bodies went still. I think about the families I sat with before and after. I think about the weight they carry, and the weight I carry, and the weight you carry.

And I think: this has to stop. Not someday. Not eventually. Now. It has to stop with someone refusing to participate. It has to stop with someone saying, I will not do this anymore.

Why not you?

I know you have reasons to continue. Reasons that feel solid and real. A mortgage. Children in school. Years invested in this career. Fear of what people will think. Fear of the unknown. These are not small things. I don’t dismiss them.

But I also know what awaits you if you continue. More ghosts. More nightmares. More pieces of your soul chipped away with each execution. A retirement spent trying not to remember. A deathbed where the faces come back, one by one, to ask the question you could never answer: Why did you keep killing people?

That future doesn’t have to be yours.

You can choose a different path. A harder path, maybe. A lonelier path, at least at first. But a path that leads somewhere other than the chamber. A path that leads back to yourself.

I will be praying for you. Not because I think prayer will change your circumstances…I’m not sure prayer works that way. But because I believe you deserve to be held in someone’s heart while you struggle with this decision. I believe you deserve to know that at least one person out there wants you to be free.

If you ever want to talk…about what you’ve done, about what you’re considering, about anything…reach out. Indeed, find anyone who will listen without judgment. You don’t have to carry this alone.

The silence protects the system. Speaking breaks it.

I have told you hard truths in this book. I have not spared you. But I have also tried to tell you the truth that matters most: you are not beyond redemption. You are not permanently stained. You are a human being who has done terrible things in the service of a terrible system, and you can still choose to stop.

That choice is before you right now. It will be before you tomorrow. It will be before you the next time they schedule an execution and someone hands you the paperwork.

In that moment, remember this book. Remember that someone wrote these words because they believed you could hear them. Remember that your soul is worth more than what they’re paying you to destroy it.

And then make your choice.

I hope…I pray…it’s the choice that sets you free.

*

*

*

*

*If you would like to support the Execution Intervention Project (the organization that financially supports Dr. Hood’s work), click here.