A pastor is touring the country to warn against the use of firing squads to carry out death sentences, telling Newsweek that he wants Americans to know it is not the humane alternative to lethal injection it is being presented as. The Reverend Jeff Hood, who has served as a spiritual adviser to more than a dozen inmates who have been executed, recently launched his "Firing Back" campaign, visiting seven states that have used or could use firing squads to carry out death sentences. The effort comes as the military is preparing to carry out its first firing squad execution since World War II, with the December 3 execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan.
President Donald Trump approved the execution days after Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute Christa Pike brought fresh scrutiny on how states carry out the death penalty, particularly when using lethal injection. The Pentagon had said Hasan's execution would be live-streamed, but President Donald Trump later called off that plan following an outcry, including from the families of the victims, retired military leaders and lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle. In a post on Truth Social last week, Trump said livestreaming the execution "might have been a strong deterrent for the World to witness how America deals with Terrorists and SCUM like Hasan" but that "many very good and well meaning people" would rather not watch him die.
Trump said the immediate families of the victims could view the execution in person if they chose to, adding that they "deserve to witness JUSTICE!" Reverend Hood, a longtime anti-death penalty activist, told Newsweek that he believes Hasan’s execution by firing squad, as well as the plans to livestream it, are in part, the Trump administration’s response to questions raised by Pike’s botched execution. Asked for comment, a White House spokesperson referred Newsweek to the president's Truth Social post announcing Hasan's execution would not be livestreamed. Hood said: "With lethal injections, such catastrophe is inevitable and we have seen botched execution after botched execution so the answer, of course, for the Trump administration is, 'Well, we'll do firing squad.' "It's going to be something that is not going to able to be botched.
The problem with that is it's a lie." Hood said it was just the latest attempt by supporters of capital punishment to promote what he calls the "lie of the clean kill." "It's this lie that the firing squad is this quick, painless form of execution," Hood said. "That's why I call my book The Lie of the Clean Kill because I fundamentally believe that there is no such thing as a clean kill. There's no such thing as a clean execution." He also said he hopes to make the issue part of the conversation ahead of November’s midterm elections.
"I think the basic question is about our future as a nation," Hood said. "Do we want to teach our young people to kill by continuing to kill? You cannot teach people in our urban centers not to shoot each other by shooting each other.
"I think the main message to the country is stand down, stand down America." Hood argues that governments have repeatedly touted methods of execution as humane only for problems to emerge once those methods are put into practice. "The firing squad is being used as a workaround from the failures of lethal injection," he told Newsweek. "Every form of execution that comes about, we're told, 'this is the clean kill.' We were told that about lethal injection.
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