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Dusty Spencer: The Oldest Man Florida Has Ever Executed

Dusty Spencer: The Oldest Man Florida Has Ever Executed

Last updated on: June 17, 2026 at 1:18 am by Jeff Hood

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Dusty Spencer: The Oldest Man Florida Has Ever Executed 2026-06-17T01:18:33-06:00 Jeff Hood

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Old Man

Slaughter the Old?

There is an age at which the world is supposed to soften toward you.

The body that once carried you begins to ask to be carried. The hands shake. The hearing goes. The years pile up behind you like a country you can no longer travel back to. We have gentle names for this season. We call it the twilight. We call it the sunset. We call it going home.

We do not call it the time to be killed.

Florida Will Not Wait for an Old Man to Die

Dusty Ray Spencer is 74 years old. He has already lived longer than most men who have ever walked this earth. He has spent more than thirty of those years inside a single cage. His liver is giving out. His body is doing what every old body finally does…it is beginning the slow work of letting go. And Florida has decided it cannot wait for that work to finish. The state intends to walk into the last room of an old man’s life and end it on a schedule.

I keep asking what it means to do this. Not whether it is legal…it is. Not whether the courts will permit it…they have. I am asking the older question. The human one. What does it mean to be a people who go looking for our eldest and kill him.

There is almost no tribe in the history of our species that did not honor its elders. The old were the ones who remembered. They held the stories, the names of the dead, the way through the famine the young had never seen. To survive into old age was to become a kind of library. You did not burn the library. You gathered around it. You fed it. You listened while you still could.

Even the Death of an Old Man Must Belong to Florida

We know what a good old age is supposed to look like. We have all pictured it for the people we love. A person grows old. Their family stays close. When death arrives, it arrives in its own hour, in a bed and not on a table, beside people who came out of love. We want that ending for our parents. We want it for ourselves. We believe, down in a place we rarely say out loud, that a long life has earned a gentle close.

Florida is assembling the opposite picture. An old man on a table. Strangers at the controls. His time was cut short by people who could have let it run.

Here is what unsettles me most. Dusty is already dying. We are all dying. He is simply closer, and his body knows it. There is a death already moving toward him that no governor signed, and no warrant was scheduled. It would have arrived in its own hour. It would have been his. The state has decided it cannot allow that. It has been decided that even the death of an old man must belong to Florida…and not to God.

That is not justice. Justice does not rush to a deathbed to make certain it gets there first. That is something older and uglier than justice. It is the will to be the one who decides. The hand on every life, including the lives already slipping free.

No Old Man Should Die Alone

A people reveals itself in how it treats the ones who can no longer fight back. The child. The prisoner. The old. We are about to learn something about Florida. We are about to learn that there is no threshold it will not step over, no gray head it will not bow, no deathbed it will not climb onto and claim.

I think of the people reading this who are growing older. I think of your hands, your knees, the names that take a second longer to arrive than they used to. I think of the day someone will decide what you are worth once you can no longer do anything for them. Pray it is not a state that decides. Pray it is someone who loves you.

Dusty does not have many people standing between him and that table. He has a few. I am one of them. On June 25, I will be in the room, because no old man should die alone among strangers who came to kill him. If the world will not soften toward him, I can at least refuse to harden.

So what does it mean to kill the oldest man Florida has ever executed?

It means we have forgotten something our oldest ancestors knew in their bones. That old age should carry a person away from the table, not toward it. That the old are not ours to spend. That there is a mercy owed to a man at the end of his road simply because he has reached the end of his road.

I do not know if Florida will remember in time.

I know I will be there either way.

I will be holding the hand of an old man, in the last room of his life, asking the state the question that keeps rolling around in my head…

When did we become a people who slaughter the old?

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Death Penalty Abolition

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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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