After witnessing the horror of the first nitrogen execution, I’m terrified to witness another. But it’s looking increasingly likely that I will.
It was horror. Pure, unrelenting horror. I can still hear Kenny Smith’s choking in my dreams. The sound burrows into my skull and won’t let go.
Serving as Smith’s spiritual advisor during the first nitrogen execution, I stood just feet away. They said the new method would be “humane,” that it would be quick, that it would be clean. They lied. What I saw was a nightmare. It was a man suffocating while the state called it justice. It was ritualized killing…clinical, cold and soaked in sin.
When the nitrogen began to flow, Kenny’s body betrayed every lie they told. He convulsed. He gagged. His chest rose and fell in wild panic. His legs shook so violently that the straps clanged against the gurney. The sound…those gasps, those deep animalistic cries…lasted forever. I prayed, but my prayers shattered into a million pieces against the stark walls. I wanted to scream, to stop it, to make the entire world cease turning. But I knew I couldn’t. They wouldn’t have stopped anyways. The machinery of death had already begun its hymn of cruelty.
People ask what it was like. It was like watching someone drown on dry land. It was like hearing a soul try to claw its way out of a body. It was torture…nothing more, nothing less.
I’ve been in execution chambers all over the country, but never like this. Nitrogen hypoxia was supposed to be sterile, scientific. Instead, it was chaos. It was horror in slow motion. It was a new method of killing wrapped in the language of progress. I watched the state turn breath…the most basic gift of God…into a weapon. And, every subsequent nitrogen execution has been described similarly.
Since that night, I haven’t known peace. I wake up gasping for air. I see Kenny’s body jerking in my sleep. I smell the rubber of the mask. I feel the terror thick in the room, the way even the guards trembled, the way the witnesses went pale. The memory lives in my lungs. Every breath since that night feels heavier.
And now, the nightmare is coming for me again. This time, it will be another one of my guys, Anthony Boyd.
Anthony is not an idea. He is a man…a living, breathing, praying child of God. He prays with me. He loves his family. He seeks grace. He knows that God loves him. He’s not what he once was. None of us are.
And yet, I am being asked to prepare him for another nitrogen execution…for the same horror that destroyed Kenny.
I do my best to sit with Anthony and talk about peace. But how do you prepare someone to die by suffocation when you are still choking on the memory of the last one? How do you help another man breathe when you have forgotten how to breathe yourself? I am supposed to be the calm, the faith, the anchor. But the truth is, I am terrified. I am trying to prepare Anthony for something that I am not prepared for. I am guiding him into a darkness that still devours me.
I keep telling him that God will be there in that room. But when I stood in that room with Kenny, God felt impossibly far away. The silence was deafening. The air was heavy with absence.
That night broke something in me. I don’t know how to walk back into that place…the stark walls, the gloved hands, the straps, the hiss of nitrogen like a serpent in the air. I don’t know how to stand there again and watch another person gasp for life while the state congratulates itself for how civilized it is.
I became a spiritual advisor to guys on death row because I believe in redemption. I’ve seen men find grace in the deepest darkness. I’ve seen forgiveness grow where no one thought it could. But the state doesn’t believe in redemption. The state believes in vengeance dressed up as justice. And every time it kills, something holy in all of us dies too.
People call me brave. I am not brave. I am haunted. I am broken. I stand in that horror because somebody has to. If no one witnesses…if no one loves…then the nightmare wins. If no one prays, the silence becomes permanent.
I believe in a God who breathes life into dust…not one who suffocates it. I believe in a Christ executed by the state…not one who blesses the state’s executions. When I watched Kenny die, it felt like standing at the foot of the cross. But this time, the crowd didn’t weep. They nodded. They took notes. They called it a fascinating new procedure.
I tell myself I can’t go back in there. Every part of my body screams not to. But I will. Because that’s what God has called me to do. To stand beside the condemned when the world turns away. To carry mercy into the machinery of death. To remind the state that every breath is sacred…even the last one.
I will go because love demands it. But I will go trembling. I shouldn’t have to go at all.
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