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Why Abolitionists Must Stand for Everyone on Death Row

Why Abolitionists Must Stand for Everyone on Death Row

Last updated on: November 2, 2025 at 11:16 pm by Jeff Hood

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Why Abolitionists Must Stand for Everyone on Death Row 2025-11-02T23:16:30-06:00 Jeff Hood

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Abolitionists

Chaplain Jim Brazzil waiting on Serial Killer Kenneth McDuff to be escorted into the Texas Execution Chamber / Moore : Wikimedia Commons

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 makes mercy look like common sense. We’ve become experts at packaging our cause in whatever form makes comfortable people comfortable.

This is not abolition. This is public relations.

If we believe the death penalty itself is the problem…if we mean that…then 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’d rather not defend. Especially the ones whose humanity we have to fight hard to even see.

Mercy Without Measure: Abolitionists Must Embody Mercy

Fighting for sympathetic defendants is easy. It costs us nothing foxr abolitionists to say, “This one shouldn’t die because they’re innocent” or “They’ve changed.” Those arguments don’t challenge the death penalty…they 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.

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 “deserve” 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.

The minute you accept that anyone deserves execution, you’ve lost. Because “deserving” is a story we tell ourselves about who has value and who doesn’t…and that story is always written by the people who will never find themselves on death row.

The Moral Test of Consistency

The abolitionist claim is not that some executions are mistakes. It’s that all executions are atrocities. The death penalty is not broken…it is functioning exactly as designed…as a tool of control, vengeance dressed in the language of justice and state power at its most naked and brutal.

Consistency is everything. The moment we carve out exceptions…this crime too vicious, that person too dangerous…we begin thinking like executioners. We adopt their taxonomy of human worth. We sort lives into columns…savable or unsavable, innocent or guilty, redeemable or disposable.

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…these are not different acts, just different aesthetics for the same violence. And every time the state kills, it teaches the same lesson…that some human beings are killable, that vengeance is virtuous and that fear is an acceptable basis for policy.

What Being an Abolitionist Really Means

Abolition is not mercy. It is not softness. It is the hardest political commitment there is…the refusal to abandon anyone to the machinery of death, even when every instinct screams to let them go.

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…violence 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’t heal trauma…it creates more of it.

To be an abolitionist is to reject that lie completely. It is to face the machinery…the restraints, the chemicals, the observers behind glass…and name it for what it is…ritual murder masquerading as justice. It is to say that nothing…no crime and no vengeance…can make this right.

The Trap of the “Good Victim”: Abolitionists’ Favorite Poison

The state wants us cautious. It wants sbolitionists to hedge, to say “We just need to make sure we don’t execute the innocent.” Because that argument doesn’t threaten the death penalty…it perfects it. It says the problem is accuracy, not the killing itself. It turns abolition into a quality control issue.

This is how the death penalty survives…by convincing even its opponents that it could work if we just reformed it enough. But you cannot reform an execution. A “humane” 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…to stop pretending that any life is expendable for the sake of order.

When we insist on standing for everyone…when we defend the guilty as fiercely as the innocent…we expose what the death penalty really is…not justice but a ritual of power, a performance in which the state demonstrates who matters and who doesn’t, whose suffering counts and whose life can be erased.

The Solidarity of the Condemned

To oppose the death penalty…to be abolitionists…is 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…poverty, 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.

Solidarity means refusing to let anyone be thrown away. It means visiting the prisons, learning the names, telling the stories that don’t make us feel good. It means saying to the person the world has given up on… You still belong to us. Your life still has irreducible worth.

We cannot heal the world by eliminating the people we’ve broken. We cannot teach that life is sacred by destroying it. Defending the condemned is not about excusing their actions…it’s about insisting that even at their worst, they remain part of the human community and we do not kill our own.

The Heartbeat of Abolitionists

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…accountability without brutality, safety without slaughter and justice that does not require blood.

The day we stop fighting only for the innocent is the day abolition becomes real. Because abolition is not about improving the system…it’s about destroying its logic entirely. It’s about dismantling the idea that any human being is disposable, that any crime justifies state murder and that vengeance is indistinguishable from justice.

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…no one…is beyond the reach of our solidarity.

If we only stand for the innocent, we have already lost. But if we stand for everyone…for the guilty, the broken and the ones we don’t want to defend…then we might finally become the kind of people who deserve the ability to use the word “abolitionist.”

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*If you would like to support the Execution Intervention Project (the organization that financially supports Dr. Hood’s work), click here.

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About The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a theologian, writer and activist who has spent years ministering to people on death row. As a spiritual advisor and witness to executions, he speaks out against state violence and calls for a society rooted in justice, mercy and the sacredness of life. You can read more about the author here.

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