{"id":14867,"date":"2025-11-02T23:08:21","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T05:08:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jeffhood\/?p=14867"},"modified":"2025-11-02T23:16:30","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T05:16:30","slug":"abolitionists-must-stand-for-everyone-on-death-row","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jeffhood\/abolitionists-must-stand-for-everyone-on-death-row\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Abolitionists Must Stand for Everyone on Death Row"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"Abolitionists\"
Chaplain Jim Brazzil waiting on Serial Killer Kenneth McDuff to be escorted into the Texas Execution Chamber \/ Moore : Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

No Exceptions: Abolitionists Must Stand for Everyone<\/strong><\/p>\n

Abolitionists (the abolitionist movement<\/a>) hemorrhages its power every time it reaches for respectability. We parade the innocent man freed by DNA evidence. We spotlight the battered woman who finally fought back. We tell the redemption stories, the ones with tears and transformation and a narrative arc that makes mercy look like common sense. We\u2019ve become experts at packaging our cause in whatever form makes comfortable people comfortable.<\/p>\n

This is not abolition. This is public relations.<\/p>\n

If we believe the death penalty itself is the problem\u2026if we mean that\u2026then there can be no exceptions. No crime too heinous, no person too monstrous, no public outcry loud enough to justify what the state does in our name. Abolition means standing for everyone the state wants to kill, especially the ones we\u2019d rather not defend. Especially the ones whose humanity we have to fight hard to even see.<\/p>\n

Mercy Without Measure: Abolitionists Must Embody Mercy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fighting for sympathetic defendants is easy. It costs us nothing foxr abolitionists to say, \u201cThis one shouldn\u2019t die because they\u2019re innocent\u201d or \u201cThey\u2019ve changed.\u201d Those arguments don\u2019t challenge the death penalty\u2026they reinforce it. They concede that execution is acceptable if only we could aim it properly, kill the right people or get the moral calculus correct.<\/p>\n

But the system cannot be aimed correctly because the system itself is the violence. It is designed to kill the powerless while comforting the powerful. It executes the poor to reassure the comfortable. It kills the broken to let the rest of us pretend we have control over chaos. Every time we concede that some people \u201cdeserve\u201d to die, we hand the state a blank check and the state will always cash it on the bodies of those with the least power to resist.<\/p>\n

The minute you accept that anyone deserves execution, you\u2019ve lost. Because \u201cdeserving\u201d is a story we tell ourselves about who has value and who doesn\u2019t\u2026and that story is always written by the people who will never find themselves on death row.<\/p>\n

The Moral Test of Consistency<\/strong><\/p>\n

The abolitionist claim is not that some executions are mistakes. It\u2019s that all executions are atrocities. The death penalty is not broken\u2026it is functioning exactly as designed\u2026as a tool of control, vengeance dressed in the language of justice and state power at its most naked and brutal.<\/p>\n

Consistency is everything. The moment we carve out exceptions\u2026this crime too vicious, that person too dangerous\u2026we begin thinking like executioners. We adopt their taxonomy of human worth. We sort lives into columns\u2026savable or unsavable, innocent or guilty, redeemable or disposable.<\/p>\n

You cannot build a moral framework on the foundation of murder. You cannot make state killing humane. The gas chamber, the electric chair, the lethal injection gurney\u2026these are not different acts, just different aesthetics for the same violence. And every time the state kills, it teaches the same lesson\u2026that some human beings are killable, that vengeance is virtuous and that fear is an acceptable basis for policy.<\/p>\n

What Being an Abolitionist Really Means<\/strong><\/p>\n

Abolition is not mercy. It is not softness. It is the hardest political commitment there is\u2026the refusal to abandon anyone to the machinery of death, even when every instinct screams to let them go.<\/p>\n

We live in a society addicted to the fantasy that killing solves killing. We are told that execution brings closure, that death balances the scales and that blood washes away blood. This is a lie we tell ourselves because the truth is unbearable\u2026violence does not resolve violence. It metastasizes. Each execution radiates outward, touching families, communities, everyone forced to carry the knowledge of what was done in their name. It doesn\u2019t heal trauma\u2026it creates more of it.<\/p>\n

To be an abolitionist is to reject that lie completely. It is to face the machinery\u2026the restraints, the chemicals, the observers behind glass\u2026and name it for what it is\u2026ritual murder masquerading as justice. It is to say that nothing\u2026no crime and no vengeance\u2026can make this right.<\/p>\n

The Trap of the \u201cGood Victim\u201d: Abolitionists\u2019 Favorite Poison<\/strong><\/p>\n

The state wants us cautious. It wants sbolitionists to hedge, to say \u201cWe just need to make sure we don\u2019t execute the innocent.\u201d Because that argument doesn\u2019t threaten the death penalty\u2026it perfects it. It says the problem is accuracy, not the killing itself. It turns abolition into a quality control issue.<\/p>\n

This is how the death penalty survives\u2026by convincing even its opponents that it could work if we just reformed it enough. But you cannot reform an execution. A \u201chumane\u201d killing is still a killing. An error-free death penalty is still a death penalty. The only way to end this is to refuse the premise entirely\u2026to stop pretending that any life is expendable for the sake of order.<\/p>\n

When we insist on standing for everyone\u2026when we defend the guilty as fiercely as the innocent\u2026we expose what the death penalty really is\u2026not justice but a ritual of power, a performance in which the state demonstrates who matters and who doesn\u2019t, whose suffering counts and whose life can be erased.<\/p>\n

The Solidarity of the Condemned<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

To oppose the death penalty\u2026to be abolitionists\u2026is to stand with the condemned not because they are innocent or reformed or sympathetic, but because they are human. Full stop. Every person on death row is the sum of a thousand systemic failures\u2026poverty, racism, untreated trauma and violence inherited across generations. These are not excuses. They are context. And context matters when we decide whether to kill or to reckon with our collective responsibility.<\/p>\n

Solidarity means refusing to let anyone be thrown away. It means visiting the prisons, learning the names, telling the stories that don\u2019t make us feel good. It means saying to the person the world has given up on\u2026 You still belong to us. Your life still has irreducible worth.<\/p>\n

We cannot heal the world by eliminating the people we\u2019ve broken. We cannot teach that life is sacred by destroying it. Defending the condemned is not about excusing their actions\u2026it\u2019s about insisting that even at their worst, they remain part of the human community and we do not kill our own.<\/p>\n

The Heartbeat of Abolitionists<\/strong><\/p>\n

The death penalty survives on fear. Fear of chaos, of violence, of wounds that can never close. Abolition demands that we face that fear and still choose life. It demands that abolitionists build something infinitely harder than punishment\u2026accountability without brutality, safety without slaughter and justice that does not require blood.<\/p>\n

The day we stop fighting only for the innocent is the day abolition becomes real. Because abolition is not about improving the system\u2026it\u2019s about destroying its logic entirely. It\u2019s about dismantling the idea that any human being is disposable, that any crime justifies state murder and that vengeance is indistinguishable from justice.<\/p>\n

Abolition is the work of reclaiming our humanity from the grip of retribution. It is the refusal to let fear and rage dictate who lives and who dies. It is the discipline of saying that no one\u2026no one\u2026is beyond the reach of our solidarity.<\/p>\n

If we only stand for the innocent, we have already lost. But if we stand for everyone\u2026for the guilty, the broken and the ones we don\u2019t want to defend\u2026then we might finally become the kind of people who deserve the ability to use the word \u201cabolitionist.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

*
\n*If you would like to support the Execution Intervention Project (the organization that financially supports Dr. Hood\u2019s work), click\u00a0here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 No Exceptions: Abolitionists Must Stand for Everyone Abolitionists (the abolitionist movement) hemorrhages its power every time it reaches for respectability. We parade the innocent man freed by DNA evidence. We spotlight the battered woman who finally fought back. We tell the redemption stories, the ones with tears and transformation and a narrative arc that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2509,"featured_media":14870,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10],"tags":[7952,506,743,7409,7799,3242],"class_list":["post-14867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-freshwritings","category-thoughts","tag-abolitionist","tag-capital-punishment","tag-criminal-justice-reform","tag-death-penalty-abolition","tag-human-rights","tag-social-justice"],"yoast_head":"\nAbolitionists Must Stand for Everyone on Death Row<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Abolitionists should have no exceptions. 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