*This post is part of a series of Holy Week reflections drawn from my new book, Suffocation by Design, tracing the final week of the life of Jesus alongside the story of nitrogen hypoxia executions in America.
The Weight of Witness: Holy Wednesday
Holy Wednesday is the quiet day. The debates of Tuesday are over. The Last Supper has not yet begun. Somewhere in the city, Judas is making arrangements. Jesus is gathered with his disciples, but the Gospels don’t give us much of the conversation. It is a day of watching and waiting…of carrying what you know into the silence before the storm.
Witness is like that. It is not always loud. Sometimes it is simply the bearing of what you have seen…the act of refusing to set it down, of insisting that the weight of truth be felt, even when no one is watching.
In Suffocation by Design, I describe my calling as a triple vocation: priest, scholar, and witness. Each role is necessary. None is sufficient alone. The priest sees the suffering. The scholar describes the suffering. The witness exposes the suffering. Together, they confront the full horror of state-sanctioned death.
The Weight of Witness: Walking Into Holman
I want to tell you what it was actually like to walk into Holman Correctional Facility on the night of Kenneth Smith’s execution, because the clinical language of court opinions and press releases could never capture it.
I had been awake for nearly three days. The hallways of Holman smelled like decomposing flesh. Various parts of the prison had been condemned in recent years, and it was easy to see why. There was fresh paint on some of the walls, and the floors had been freshly scrubbed…as if the state thought it could cover up the evil with paint and cleaner. When I arrived at the area where the guards were stationed outside the chamber, the television was playing the old sitcom Wings. Guards had fallen asleep in their chairs. I heard multiple guards say they were hungry and just ready to get it over with so they could eat. They were within speaking distance of a man about to die who hadn’t had much to eat all day, talking about how they couldn’t wait for him to die so they could eat some brisket.
That is the context in which America kills people. Not with solemnity. Not with the weight of moral gravity pressing down on everyone in the room. With boredom and institutional indifference to the enormity of what is about to happen. And then, the huge metal door to the chamber opened.
What the Priest Holds
Before the execution, Kenny and I had prayed together. I read to him from the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of John.
“Jesus said, ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled…'”
Kenny started to talk back with fierceness.
“I won’t.”
“Believe in God; believe also in me.”
“I do.”
“In my Father’s house there are many rooms…”
“Thank you, Jesus! Yes, Lord!”
He kept calling it his release date. The joy in his face was real…I had watched him closely enough to know when he was putting something on and when he wasn’t.
He told me, “I ain’t scared of no valley of the shadow of death.”
I anointed him with frankincense oil. The smell filled that sterile room…an intrusion of the sacred into a space consecrated to death. When I read the passage from the Gospel of John…the one where Jesus gets down in the dirt and says “You who are without sin cast the first stone”…Kenny rose up and spoke loudly to his executioners: “You know he’s talking to y’all, right?!?!” He wanted to make sure that his final act of resistance was confronting those guards with the words of the Savior they claimed to serve.
As the hour drew closer, Kenny let out one more encouragement: “Don’t be sad, Jeff. It’s my release date.”
What Anthony Boyd Taught Me
Anthony Boyd asked me to accompany him to his execution. Before it began, he gave me specific instructions…not as a passive recipient of pastoral care, but as a philosopher…a philosopher of his own death. He had been practicing his breathing. He wanted me to watch his chest, his feet, his legs. He explained exactly what each movement would mean. He was preparing me to be his witness.
He told me: every inhale brings life, every exhale releases it. In that chamber, breath is both prayer and witness. His lungs were a sermon. His chest a scripture. Each breath carried the weight of what must be remembered.
He raised one leg slowly, then the other. Holding them up, he said, is the language of resistance. When his legs trembled, that would be the limit of the body, the boundary where pain speaks louder than words. You must see it, understand it. It is the proof, the testimony, the measure of how far a soul can stretch in witness. I am offering this not for me, but for every soul who will come after, for every person who must know that this horror existed…and that love persisted even here.
Anthony was not a passive victim of the state’s machinery. He was the philosopher…the theologian even…of his own death, insisting that someone see, mark, remember and speak. He turned his execution into a teaching. His final breaths into activism. He made sure that even if the state could silence his voice, it could not silence his body…and that his body would be witnessed by someone who would tell the truth about what it said.
The Weight of Witness: The Cost of Seeing
Witnessing nitrogen hypoxia is not something you recover from. In Suffocation by Design, I write honestly about what that cost looks like…the nightmares, the recurring images, the waking in the dark with the sensation of breath being pulled from your own lungs. The fluorescent lights flickering in dreams. The hiss of nitrogen becoming a scream I cannot locate.
I write about it not to generate sympathy for myself but because the trauma is itself evidence. If a trained witness…spiritually and intellectually prepared…still carries these images, what does that tell us about what actually occurred in those chambers? The state’s vocabulary is administrative: the procedure was conducted according to protocol. The body’s vocabulary is convulsive, urgent and impossible to contain in a press release. When those two vocabularies meet, only one of them tells the truth.
The Communal Weight
Holy Wednesday reminds us that witness is not only individual. The disciples carried the weight together. The testimony that eventually emerged from that community…the Gospels themselves…was collective witness, shaped by many voices insisting that what happened to Jesus not be erased.
Anyone who encountered the reality of nitrogen hypoxia became part of a larger story about what America does in its most secretive moments. That collective witness is not defined by proximity to the chamber but by proximity to the truth. Once a person understands what suffocation looks like, official descriptions can no longer replace reality.
This Holy Wednesday, I am asking you to add your weight to the witness…so that the community will continue to grow.
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