*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.
Suffocation By Design: The Final Meal
On Maundy Thursday, Jesus gathered his disciples for a final meal. He broke bread and poured wine, giving them his body and blood in forms they could hold in their hands. He washed their feet… the act of a servant, not a sovereign. And then he walked into Gethsemane, where he knelt in the dark and prayed: “Not my will, but yours.”
Every condemned person is also given a final meal. It is one of the few remaining rituals by which our society acknowledges, however awkwardly, that the person about to be executed is still a human being…still someone with particular tastes, with a history, with something that matters to them in the final hours. I have sat through many of those final hours. I have prayed with men making their last phone calls. And I have learned that the most important thing I can bring into those rooms is not theology…it is simply presence. The willingness to stay.
Stay Awake With Me : The Eucharist in the Execution Chamber
As a priest, I bring the Eucharist into spaces that were never designed to receive it. I bring bread and wine into rooms arranged for the efficient ending of life. I bring oil for anointing into spaces that smell of antiseptic and institutional neglect. I carry a battered Bible and the knowledge that the guards are watching and that some of them find the whole exercise irritating.
Before Kenny was executed, I tried to command the vial and the Bible in front of the prison staff. They all looked at me as if I were the devil incarnate. My hands were shaking badly enough that I was certain I would spill the oil all over the floor. Kenny looked at me and whispered something I’ll never forget: “We got this.”
When I leaned over to anoint him, I said: “Kenny Smith, you are a beloved child of God. Go to that place where you have always known that you are from. Do not delay. Love is waiting to manifest in you the fullness of love. May the smell of this oil guide you to the fullness of who you were created to be. Kenny, you are free.”
The oil filled the room with an intense aroma. One of the guards moved his hand in a circular hurrying motion. I wasn’t going to stop until I was done with what I had planned to do. The excess oil was all over my hands. I rubbed it on the sheet that Kenny was laying on. I didn’t want to take any of the excess smell with me. I knew he would need it more than I.
Stay Awake With Me : The Vigil of Gethsemane
After the anointing, I was led away and left to wait. The wait was its own kind of crucible. I had been awake for nearly three days. Lights started to spin. I realized I was dozing off. And in the confusion of it all, I repeatedly heard the cry of Jesus…which I assumed was also now the cry of Kenny…”Couldn’t you just stay awake with me?”
Minutes later, the guards called my name. I jumped up. Unsteady on my feet, I wobbled back and forth. Leaning against the table, I pulled it together. Or maybe God did, I don’t know. I just knew it was time to proceed with the execution. Kenny needed me.
Each step toward the chamber caused my stomach to grow tighter and tighter. I literally thought that my nerves might make me sick. The guard who escorted me muttered under her breath: “These are the bad ones. Days like this stick to you.” I felt a flicker of pity for her…a woman caught between duty and conscience, too far gone to act, yet too awake to escape. When we arrived at the big steel door, she knocked three times. No answer. She knocked again. No answer. She stated the obvious: “He’s resisting.” I found myself strangely proud of him. Not for the violence, but for the fact that he refused to allow his murder to happen easily. Shouldn’t it be difficult to kill someone?
Stay Awake With Me : “Not My Will, But Yours”
The prayer of Gethsemane is the most honest prayer in all of scripture. It does not pretend that what is coming is acceptable. It does not manufacture peace where there is only dread. It simply surrenders…not to the empire, not to the execution, but to something larger than either.
I have heard versions of that prayer from every man I have accompanied to execution. Sometimes it sounds like Kenny Smith saying “I ain’t fearing shit” in response to the 23rd Psalm. Sometimes it sounds like Anthony Boyd telling me that his lungs are a sermon, his chest is a scripture and his final breaths are a map for those who come after him. What the state cannot reach with its nitrogen masks and its redacted protocols is the spiritual core of a human being. The body can be strapped to a gurney. The air can be replaced with nitrogen. But the soul’s final courage is beyond the reach of any execution protocol.
The Judicial Last Supper
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the Supreme Court’s refusal to stop Anthony Boyd’s execution with words that read as a kind of judicial Gethsemane prayer…a voice that knows what is about to happen, that cannot stop it, but that refuses to be silent.
Sotomayor argued that the lower courts had failed to apply constitutional analysis meaningfully…that they had accepted state assurances at face value while ignoring a documented record of prolonged conscious suffering. She framed her dissent not only as legal disagreement but as moral alarm. Allowing these executions, she argued, fails to protect the dignity of the nation…the nation we have been, the nation we are and the nation we aspire to be. She warned that if nitrogen executions continued unchecked, the method would become normalized despite its severe burdens, with future states adopting it without meaningful judicial review.
“By denying a stay, the majority ‘turn their back on Boyd and on the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee.’ She expresses deep disappointment that the Court, faced with mounting evidence, declined to pause and reflect. Instead, it allowed a state to push forward with a method whose true nature…and true suffering…is still not fully understood or publicly disclosed.”
Her dissent did not stop the execution. Anthony Boyd died. His execution was the longest nitrogen execution yet…nineteen minutes of agonized breathing, followed by seventeen more as his body clung to life. But her words remain…a record of what the highest court was told and what it chose not to do.
Stay Awake With Me : The Table Is Still Set
Maundy Thursday ends not in the execution but in the meal…in the table that remains set, in bread broken and wine poured, in the insistence that what has been given cannot be taken back by what is about to happen.
I believe in that table. I believe in it even after eleven executions, even after the nightmares, even after the moments of waking in the dark with the sound of nitrogen hissing in my memory. I believe in it precisely because I have seen what its absence looks like…in spaces where human beings are reduced to bodies…bodies to procedures…procedures to press releases…and press releases to official verdicts that everything went according to plan.
The table is still set. The bread is still broken. The question is whether we will sit at it honestly…with the full weight of what we know about what this nation does in its execution chambers…or whether we will avoid the meal because the truth it requires us to hold is too heavy.
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