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The Man Who Never Knew Peace: Dusty Spencer’s Last War

The Man Who Never Knew Peace: Dusty Spencer’s Last War

Last updated on: June 17, 2026 at 11:06 pm by Jeff Hood

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The Man Who Never Knew Peace: Dusty Spencer’s Last War 2026-06-17T23:06:41-06:00 Jeff Hood

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Dusty Spencer

Dusty Spencer Never Knew Peace

On June 25, the state of Florida intends to kill a man who has never known peace.

His name is Dusty Spencer. He is seventy-four years old. He has been at war his entire life. Not the way a soldier is…in seasons, with a clean beginning then a clean end. He has been at war the way a man is when the fighting started before he could understand it. The way a man is when the war never once let him go. To see what Florida is about to do, you have to see that its execution is not the first war waged on Dusty Spencer. It is only the last.

Let me walk you through them.

The War in the Cradle

The first war came for him when he was a child.

He did not enlist in it. He did not start it. A child never does. It was waged on him by hands that were supposed to protect him, in the years when a person is least able to defend himself. There is a name for what is done to a child like that. We rarely call it war. But look at the shape of it. A war has a stronger side and a weaker one. A war leaves the weaker one marked for the rest of his days. By that measure, the first thing that ever happened to Dusty Spencer was a war. He lost it before he could speak.

Something happens to a child raised under fire. The body learns the world is a threat. The nerves learn to brace. The soul learns that love and danger come through the same door. You can grow a man out of that child. You cannot grow the war out of the man. It stays in him. It waits in him. The country that would one day put a rifle in his hands did not give him his first wound. It found a boy already bleeding and decided he would make a good soldier.

The War the Country Sent

Then the country called and Dusty Spencer answered.

He put on the uniform of the United States Marine Corps. He went to the Philippines. He walked toward the danger everyone else was running from. He saved lives…real people, real names he never stopped to collect, who grew old because a young Marine would not leave them behind. The country took the boy the first war had broken and trained him to charge into fire. It made him good at war. It pinned its honor on his chest.

Think about what that is. We find a wounded child, we wait for him to grow, then we hand him a weapon and call it service. We are very good at this. We gather up the people the early wars have already hollowed out and we march them into the next ones. Then we act surprised when they cannot put the fighting down. Dusty Spencer came home with the war still live inside him. The country that lit that fire in a far-off jungle never stayed to put it out. It never does.

The War That Came Home

I will not lie to you about how this story turns.

The war that was waged on Dusty Spencer did not stay inside him. It came out. A woman is dead. Her name was Karen Spencer. The grief that tore through that family is real and nothing I write will mend it. I hold her. Abolition that forgets the victim is not abolition. It is denial in a clean shirt.

But understand where that violence came from. It did not arrive out of nowhere on the worst day of his life. Nothing ever does. Violence is not born in a man. It is put there. It was put in Dusty Spencer when he was a child too small to refuse it. It was sharpened in him when the country made him a weapon and shipped him to a war. It was left to smolder when they brought him home and walked away. The crime that took Karen Spencer was not a stranger breaking into his life. It was the war he had lived in since birth…reaching, at last, the one closest to him.

This is not an excuse. I am not handing you one. A wound does not erase a death. A history does not return a life. Dusty Spencer did a terrible thing, and a woman paid for it with everything she had. But there is a difference between explaining a thing and excusing it. The state needs you to forget that difference. The state needs the crime to have no past. It needs you to believe Dusty Spencer began on the morning of his worst act and that nothing came before. That is the only way the killing makes sense. Strip a man of his whole life, and he is easy to put to death. Give him back his whole life, and the truth comes with it. His whole life was war. The crime was one more round of it. The execution will be the last.

The Last War of Dusty Spencer

Now the country has scheduled the last war.

It will be waged on June 25, in a small room with a table and a clock. It will not look like the others. There will be no rifle. There will be no jungle. There will be a gurney, a needle, a set of straps. But make no mistake what it is. It is the final campaign in a war that has hunted this man since he was small. The state means to finish what was begun against him in childhood. It means to do to the old man exactly what was first done to the boy. It means to be the last thing that ever makes war on Dusty Spencer.

And here is the deepest truth under all of it. This room is the throne the whole bloody order kneels to. The death penalty is not one cruelty among many. It is the one that licenses the rest. Once a state may kill a man on a schedule, it may do anything smaller without flinching. Paul said the love of money was the root of all evil. I tell you the root is this…the love of killing, dressed in a robe and renamed the law. Pull up that root and the whole tree dies with it. Leave it in the ground and it will go on bearing the only fruit it knows.

Dusty Spencer Before June 25

I am a pacifist. I do not believe a killing answers a killing. I have spent my life saying no government holds the right to decide who lives. So I can hold all of it at once. The wars done to him. The harm done by him. And I can still tell you the truth…his killing will heal no one.

Five of his jurors looked at the whole of his life and said let him live. The vote was seven to five. In no state in this country could that divided vote send a man to die today. The only thing carrying Dusty Spencer to that gurney is the year on the calendar…and a state that has run out of mercy.

One man can stop the last war with a single sentence. Governor DeSantis can grant a reprieve. He does not need a court. He does not need a cabinet. He needs only the will to look at a wounded old veteran and decide the state has made enough war on him.

Dusty Spencer has been at war since before he could speak.

I pray that somehow he finds peace.

Catholic

Politics and Religion

Death Penalty Abolition

Dusty Ray Spencer

Florida execution

veteran death row

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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June 17, 2026

Dusty Spencer: The Oldest Man Florida Has Ever Executed

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