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Death by State: ICE, Police Brutality and Executions

Death by State: ICE, Police Brutality and Executions

Last updated on: January 27, 2026 at 2:51 am by Jeff Hood

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Death by State: ICE, Police Brutality and Executions 2026-01-27T02:51:17-06:00 Jeff Hood

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Death by State

In January 2026, Minneapolis once more became a killing ground. Federal immigration agents shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three, during an enforcement operation. Weeks later, they fatally shot ICU nurse Alex Pretti in a separate confrontation. Both incidents were captured on video. Both sparked national outrage. And both revealed a reality that much of America would prefer to ignore: the state has the power to take life with impunity.

These deaths aren’t anomalies. They’re the latest entries in a ledger that includes George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless others killed during traffic stops, wellness checks and no-knock raids. At the same time…in a different venue, under different rules…the death penalty continues its work. Legal processes replace split-second decisions. Judges and juries replace badges and guns. The method changes, but not the outcome: death by state.

The procedural distinctions we draw between these forms of killing are morally meaningless. Whether through bullets in the streets or lethal injection in an execution chamber, the state is making the same claim: ultimate authority over human life. To understand how this works…and why we should reject it…we need to examine the logic behind death by state, who it targets and what it reveals about power in American society.

Death by State and the Logic of Killing

Street Executions and Judicial Time

When ICE agents shot Renee Nicole Good, the entire process took seconds. There was no trial, no judge weighing evidence, no jury deliberating guilt or innocence…just an officer’s decision, a trigger pulled and then the familiar script of official justifications that always follows these killings. The agent feared for his life. The situation was chaotic. Protocol was followed.

Compare this to death row. Someone sentenced to execution might spend decades in appeals, with multiple courts reviewing the case, lawyers filing briefs, judges writing opinions…the whole grinding apparatus of legal process moving forward until eventually a date gets set and the state administers whatever method of execution it’s chosen. The timeline stretches from seconds to decades, but the endpoint doesn’t change. The state has decided this person will die…and does everything it can to make it happen.

Ceremony, Uniform and Authority

The formality makes it feel different. That’s the point.

One death gets dressed up in the robes and gavels of judicial process. The other comes in uniform with a badge. Strip away those ceremonial differences…and you’re left with the same thing: authority exercised without genuine accountability, lives ended by deliberate choice, the state demonstrating to everyone watching that it has the power to kill and will use it when it wants to.

Death by State as Communication

You don’t need to read political philosophy to understand what’s happening here. Just watch who gets killed and what happens afterward. “Operation Metro Surge”…that’s what ICE called its Minneapolis raids, a name that tells you everything about the message being sent. We’re surging into your communities, we’ve got overwhelming force, resistance is pointless. Immigrant communities got the message. Your presence is conditional. Your rights are negotiable. Your life can be ended if you’re perceived as a threat to operations.

Death row delivers the same basic communication to a different audience. We can kill you, we will kill you and when your final appeal gets denied and your execution date arrives, you’ll understand…along with everyone else watching…that the state gets the last word. Always.

Death by State as Policy and Social Control

Violence as Choice, Not Necessity

What gets lost in all the talk about “officer-involved shootings” and “capital punishment” is that both are policy choices. Nobody’s forcing the state to kill people. It’s choosing to.

The justifications for extrajudicial killings follow a predictable pattern. Officers feared for their lives. Departments cite policy manuals. Officials insist everything was done by the book. The story is always that this particular death was necessary, maybe regrettable, but ultimately unavoidable given the circumstances. Except the pattern suggests something else entirely…unarmed civilians dying during wellness checks, children shot for holding toys, people killed in their own homes or during routine traffic stops or while asking for help. The specific justifications change but what stays constant is which lives get treated as expendable, which people are deemed undeserving of the benefit of the doubt.

Rationalizing Death by State

The death penalty uses different language. Deterrence, justice for victims, society’s moral condemnation…proponents have been cycling through these arguments for decades. None of them survive scrutiny. The deterrent effect? Unproven. Murder rates show no meaningful correlation with execution rates. States that abolished capital punishment haven’t descended into chaos. States that execute people regularly show no particular benefit in public safety. Texas keeps executing people and its murder rate stays high. The justifications don’t hold up, which leaves you with the simple fact underneath: the state kills because it’s decided to kill.

In both cases death gets treated as a tool, something you can calculate and deploy rather than a moral catastrophe. There are policy documents outlining acceptable standards for the use of force. Legislatures debating whether nitrogen hypoxia is more humane than lethal injection. Bureaucrats processing death with the same procedural efficiency they bring to parking tickets. That rationalization might be the most disturbing part…watching killing transform from ethical crisis into administrative task.

Fear as Policy

Communities understand what’s being communicated even when officials pretend they’re not saying anything.

Immigrant neighborhoods watch ICE raids and learn that cooperation doesn’t guarantee safety. Black communities see another video of a police shooting and understand compliance doesn’t ensure survival. Families of the condemned recognize that exhausting every appeal won’t save anyone. Fear operates as policy. Death by state functions as demonstration.

Systemic Inequity and Vulnerability

Victims of Death by State

Death by state concentrates among the vulnerable. The poor. Racial minorities. Immigrants. People with mental illness. Those without resources to defend themselves. This isn’t random distribution.

The Minneapolis killings of people trying to protect vulnerable communities fits perfectly into this pattern…ICE didn’t raid wealthy white suburbs, they went after immigrant communities that already experience higher rates of police contact, harsher enforcement, less institutional protection. These neighborhoods get policed more aggressively, residents viewed with more suspicion, perceived threats met with more force and when someone dies it gets folded into statistics about “high-crime areas” and “dangerous encounters” as though geography and danger were just natural facts instead of products of deliberate policy choices about where to deploy force and how much violence to accept.

Selective Death by State Justice

Death row operates through different mechanisms but arrives at the same selectivity. Defendants who kill white victims face harsher sentences than those who kill Black victims. Poor defendants get overworked public defenders without resources for investigation or expert witnesses. Prosecutors systematically strike Black jurors. People with intellectual disabilities end up on death row, along with juveniles and those with severe mental illness, despite constitutional prohibitions supposedly preventing exactly these outcomes.

The death penalty doesn’t go after the “worst of the worst.”

It goes after people who can’t navigate a legal system built on money and connections and social capital. Wealthy white defendants hire expert witnesses, file sophisticated appeals, delay execution indefinitely if they’re sentenced to death at all…and often they aren’t. Poor Black defendants with overworked public defenders face much worse odds. Same pattern shows up in street violence: white motorist pulled over for speeding, Black motorist pulled over for speeding, different risk calculations for each.

Power, Not Guilt

What you see in all these patterns is pretty straightforward…vulnerability determines who dies by state, not guilt. The law pretends to be blind but lethal state power has perfect vision when it comes to race and class. It targets selectively, amplifies existing hierarchies, leaves people with resources mostly insulated while everyone else becomes a statistic.

Irreversibility and the Limits of Legality

The Finality of Death by State

Death is final.

Once someone’s dead, there’s no legal remedy that brings them back, no compensation that undoes the loss, no apology that matters. People have been cleared from death row after years or decades in cells waiting to be killed for crimes they didn’t commit…DNA evidence exonerating them, witnesses recanting, prosecutors admitting misconduct, the system failing them over and over before finally, grudgingly, admitting it got the wrong person. Some of them came within days or hours of execution.

Which raises the question nobody can answer: How many innocent people have already been executed? Cases that were never reopened, never scrutinized, never exonerated because the person was already dead? You can’t answer that with any certainty, which exposes the fundamental problem with capital punishment…human institutions make mistakes but death doesn’t allow for corrections.

Irreversible Harm of Death by State

Extrajudicial killings don’t even have the flawed safeguards that exist in capital cases. But whether death takes years of appeals or happens in seconds on the street, the finality is identical.

This irreversibility destroys trust in ways that compound over time. If police kill with impunity, why cooperate with investigations? If the justice system executes innocent people, why believe in its legitimacy? Kids who witness police violence learn to fear authority. Families who lose someone to death by state carry grief that reshapes their politics, their sense of safety, their faith in institutions. The trauma doesn’t stay contained…it spreads across generations.

You can’t easily justify extinguishing a life through procedure or policy. The consequences ripple through families and communities far beyond the immediate victim. And each death makes accepting the next one a little easier, believing the next justification a little more automatic.

The Illusion of Death by State Distinctions

Process as Disguise

If you don’t examine too closely, procedural differences between street executions and judicial ones seem significant. One takes seconds, the other takes decades. One has no formal process, the other involves massive legal machinery. But if you focus on outcomes instead of process, the distinction evaporates pretty fast…either way, the state has decided someone will die.

People defending capital punishment point to all those procedural protections…trials, appeals, multiple court reviews…as proof the system is careful and just. Except these protections are shot through with inequities from top to bottom. Quality of legal representation depends entirely on money. Judges carry their biases onto the bench. Juries get selected or excluded based on race. Prosecutors exercise enormous discretion over who gets charged capitally. Wrongful convictions keep happening despite all these protections, not because the protections are absent.

The Authority to Kill

Street killings skip procedure completely but leave you with the same core question: what gives the state the right to take life? Officer shoots an unarmed civilian, claims reasonable fear. Prosecutor pursues the death penalty, claims the crime was so heinous it demands ultimate punishment. Both justifications rest on one foundation…the state having legitimate authority to kill. Whether the killing happens during a moment of panic or after decades of deliberation, whether it gets defended by invoking split-second decisions or statutory authority, the fundamental assertion stays the same.

Cognitive Dissonance

The illusion serves a function, allowing society to accept some killings while condemning others, to keep faith in institutions while acknowledging when they fail, to believe in justice while watching its absence play out repeatedly. But you can’t sustain that kind of cognitive dissonance forever. Each new killing erodes the illusion a little more. Each exoneration. Each video going viral. What’s left when the illusion finally collapses is just the uncomfortable reality underneath…the state kills people, and dressing it up in procedure doesn’t change what’s actually happening.

The Consistent Conclusion of Death by State

Death by state…extrajudicial execution, police violence, lethal injection…is always the same moral act: the state claiming ultimate authority over human life.

Recognizing that equivalence forces some uncomfortable questions. What does justice mean if the state kills citizens on the street with impunity? What legitimacy can a system claim when it executes people despite evidence of innocence? What kind of society targets marginalized communities for lethal violence while insisting it’s there to serve and protect?

These aren’t rhetorical.

The challenge isn’t reforming procedures or adding safeguards or redistributing who bears the burden of state violence more equitably. It’s confronting the fundamental question underneath everything else: should any state have the power to deliberately take human life? Not whether the death penalty works as deterrence. Not whether police need better training. Whether the authority to kill should exist at all.

Until that question is answered, killings will continue and justifications will follow. Minneapolis is not an exception but an example. Whether death comes after decades of appeals or in a moment on the street, the act is the same. Death by state. The state decides who lives and who dies. The rest is procedure.

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About The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a Catholic priest (Old Catholic), theologian, and nationally recognized activist based in North Little Rock, Arkansas. A spiritual advisor to death row inmates across the country, Dr. Hood has accompanied more people to their executions than any other advisor in the U.S., including the first-ever nitrogen hypoxia execution in 2024. His work sits at the intersection of justice, radical compassion, and public theology. Dr. Hood holds advanced degrees from Auburn, Emory, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, University of Alabama, Creighton, and Brite Divinity School, among others. He also earned a PhD in metaphysical theology and founded The New Theology School, where he serves as Dean and Professor of Prophetic Theology. Author of over 100 books—including the award-winning The Courage to Be Queer—Dr. Hood’s writings and activism have been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR, CNN, and more. A frequent collaborator with men on death row, he sees theology as a shared, liberative act. Dr. Hood has served on the leadership teams of organizations like the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. His activism has earned multiple awards, including recognition from PFLAG and the Next Generation Action Network. On July 7, 2016, Dr. Hood led the Dallas protest against police brutality that ended in tragedy. His actions that night saved lives, and his story is now archived in the Dallas Public Library. A father of five, husband to Emily, and friend to the incarcerated, Dr. Hood rejects institutionalism in favor of a theology rooted in people, presence, and prophetic witness. You can read more about the author here.

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