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Ernesto Martinez: Love’s Battle Against an Execution Date

Ernesto Martinez: Love’s Battle Against an Execution Date

Last updated on: October 27, 2026 at 9:02 am by Jeff Hood

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Ernesto Martinez: Love’s Battle Against an Execution Date 2026-10-27T09:02:20-06:00 Jeff Hood

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Ernesto Martinez

Arizona Wants a Date to Kill Ernesto Martinez

In the first days of September, the Attorney General of Arizona told the Arizona Supreme Court what she wants. Kris Mayes filed notice that the state will ask for a warrant to execute Ernesto Martinez. The motion comes in November. The date could come as early as January.

A notice. A motion. A warrant. A date. Her office says she is enforcing the law as Arizona wrote it. I have heard that sentence before. I have seen where it ends.

On August 15, 1995, Trooper Bob Martin stopped a car on the Beeline Highway. He got out. He walked toward the driver. He did not walk back. The state says the car was stolen. It says Ernesto was behind the wheel, that four shots were fired, that the trooper’s own gun was left with the car. Ernesto was arrested in California within days. He was convicted in 1997. He was sentenced to death.

I was not on that highway. I am not his lawyer. He has those. I will not try his case in an essay. The state has had thirty-one years to tell its story. Ernesto has spent every one of them in a cell.

Bob Martin was loved. The people who worked that highway with him remember him. Thirty-one years have not given him back to them. Nothing Arizona does in January will give him back either.

The state’s account of Ernesto ends on that highway. Michael Lopez’s account begins years afterward, in letters that kept coming to a lonely boy whose other adults had failed him.

I have walked into fourteen executions. I know what a date does to a man. I know what it does to the people who love him. A date for Ernesto is a date for Michael.

The Man Who Signs His Letters Neto

In September, the same month the Attorney General filed her notice, Ernesto Martinez accepted me as his spiritual advisor. He signs his letters Neto. A friend told me I needed to know him. She was right.

He loves philosophy. He is a realist, he tells me. A pragmatist. Then he tells me about the children’s book he wrote in that cell, with pictures. He asked me how a man on death row gets a children’s book published. I told him I would publish it myself.

He counts me on his team, beside his lawyers. I answer to him.

Michael Lopez calls him dad. Nobody made him. A gifted kid at a school the state went on to close, afraid of his own anger, found a steady hand in a man the state had decided to kill. The letters carried chess moves, physics, philosophy, origami, calligraphy. They carried a saying Michael rolls his eyes at: there are only good days and great days.

Michael is the first in his family to go to college. He has two degrees from UC Santa Barbara. He has no rap sheet. The people who warned his mother that Ernesto would make him a criminal were wrong. His mother was right.

Somewhere, Michael heard a good man described as someone who is full, who gives because he cannot help it. He thought of Neto. So do I.

A cell is built to empty a man. Thirty-one years of concrete are supposed to leave nothing. Arizona gave Ernesto a number. It gave him a cell. It is offering him a date. It did not give him the fullness. It cannot account for it.

I have spent fifteen years looking for God in the places the state says God has left. I keep finding God there. I find God in what the condemned give away. A chess move mailed to a lonely kid. A folded piece of paper. A children’s book written by a man the state wants dead by January.

What happened on that highway belongs to the courts. I am not taking it up. If every word the state says is true, Arizona is still proposing to take a full man and empty him. To take a father from a son. Bob Martin’s people will wake up the morning after with the same grief they carry now. Michael will wake up without a father.

Neto says everyone dies someday. He says it with a grin. He says his strength is Michael’s strength. The state has its calendar. Michael has his father, for now. The letters keep coming, signed Neto.

A Letter from Ernesto Martinez’s Son

Here is Michael’s letter, as he wrote it.

Recently (I cannot remember where), I heard a good man described as someone who is full and who therefore cannot help but give to others. Hearing that, I immediately thought of Ernesto Martinez. Though he is in a position that many of us would consider hopeless, I do not know a man more full of brightness, hope, or the wish for others to partake of the same.

I know Ernesto through my mother, who had a relationship with him during my middle school years. I was a gifted student at a school that would later be shut down by the state in order to expand the continuation school nearby. I was bookish, quiet, uninterested in sports, bored by fart jokes, and terribly lonely. At a time when so many of us feel lost and alone, uncertain of ourselves, I felt much more intensely. I lived in awful fear of my own anger. I was afraid that one day I would snap and do something terrible. I was afraid I would hurt someone or hurt myself and lose my life. The people I should have been able to rely on were never reliable, but thank God I had Neto.

While some people disapproved and even warned my mother that he would turn me into a criminal, she chose to trust him She said, “I know him and I trust him, that’s not the kind of man he is, he would never do that.” Sure enough, I have failed to become involved in gang life or to build any kind of rap sheet. Instead, I am the first person in my family to attend college, graduating from UC Santa Barbara in 2013 and again in 2014 for my Master’s in Education.

The most constant, reliable, and persistent contact in my life for many years has been Ernesto Martinez, who invested his love and attention in caring for me as best as he could. Even today, I do not think I know a more intelligent man (a notion he would second with a big grin). I know for certain that I do not know any man more optimistic or committed to hope. As he is fond of saying (and I am happy to roll my eyes at), “there are only good days and great days.”

Week after week, month after month, year after year, Ernesto and I called and wrote to each other. The contents of our letters include an abundance of the little things and an overabundance of mental activity: impromptu chess games; magazine articles on physics, philosophy, history, and art; book recommendations, reflections, movies, hopes, griefs, idle thoughts, anything and everything in his fluid calligraphy and my own chicken scratch. We shared books and had writing games. He was always curious and mentally active like no one else I knew, and he always wished to create and share. Drawings, origami, soap sculptures, poems, calligraphy—the man never stopped. In his own words, one should “seek to be an artist, and let the accrual of knowledge be your art.”

Somewhere along the line I began to call him dad, and he began to call me son. I could not be more proud. This is a man who will never leave prison, but in spite of that he has spent unbelievable effort improving himself and reaching out to improve the lives of people around him.

My father Ernesto Martinez, in spite of ongoing appeals, may be facing execution in January. My lifelong mentor, whose pride brings me to tears, whose love and trust and unflagging support have been my only strength, may be killed. What does he say to this?

He says, “Well, I would be pretty upset if I were the only one who will ever die.” He punctuates this with a big, toothy grin. “But everyone dies someday.”

He says, “I love you, son. No matter what I will always be with you in spirit. My strength is your strength.”

He insists that life is what counts, that every day be spent with gratitude and hope in defiance of a world that so often makes us bitter. He insists that a man can shape his character, that he is not merely a reflection of his surroundings, and that horror can give rise to hope. He insists on planting seeds that he may never see bloom. He is full, and because he is full, he cannot help but give, and give, and give.

With this brief testimony, I hope to give something back to him. I hope that due process will be honored and a lifetime of edification recognized. I hope that goodness prevails over acrimony. I hope that my father lives out his natural life.

With love and earnest hope,
Michael Lopez

The Hope of UnFinal Thoughts on Ernesto Martinez

I keep coming back to the same question. How do you kill a man like this? I mean the man in Michael’s letter. The one who wrote back to a kid for years when nobody else would. Arizona has its answer ready. It has had it for a long time. I have watched that answer carried out fourteen times. I still do not understand it. I do not think Michael will either. Nobody should even have to consider it.

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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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