I have stood in more execution chambers in more states than any spiritual advisor in the history of the United States. Twelve times I have watched the state kill a person I came to love. Twice I have watched nitrogen gas do it. I have heard last breaths, last words, last heartbeats through a stethoscope held up to a microphone. I do not write this book from a library. I write it from the witness room.
This is a book about a bullet. It is a book about one decision. On July 1, 2026, the state of Idaho became the first jurisdiction in American history to make the firing squad its primary method of execution rather than its backup. That decision rests on four promises. The bullet is certain. The bullet is humane. The bullet is honest. When someone is given a choice, the bullet is a free choice. I will show you, promise by promise, that none of this is true.
I write as someone who has been in the room. The condemned are not abstractions to me and they are not case numbers. They are people I have known by name, whose last hours I sat through, whose deaths I watched a state carry out on a schedule it had published in advance. Where this book turns analytical, tracing statutes, autopsy reports and legislative votes, it does so because that is what the record will bear, and because the people at the end of that record deserve an argument that can survive a hostile reading. The state can dress killing up in a hundred procedures. It remains killing.
This book is dedicated to the seven men and the one woman on Idaho’s death row. It is also dedicated to everyone who has ever stood at the front of a firing squad’s rifles, whether wearing the hood or holding the gun.
A note on the method of this book. Every factual claim in this book that can be sourced to a public record, a news account, a court filing or a government statement is cited in the endnotes at the end of each chapter. Where I describe what I personally witnessed, in Alabama’s nitrogen chamber or in any of the other twelve executions I have witnessed, I say so plainly. I have tried throughout to distinguish what the record shows from what I believe the record means. Readers are owed that distinction. I have tried to honor it even when my own conclusions are not neutral.
Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood
North Little Rock, Arkansas
July 13, 2026