[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, PENN., FLA., ALA.

[Rick Halperin]

May 11



TEXAS:

Texas Fighting Order to Disclose Execution Drug Supplier


More than a year after a judge ordered Texas to divulge the source of its 
execution drugs, the information has not been released, legislators passed a 
state law protecting the prison agency from doing so, and the lengthy appeal 
that has allowed the provider to remain secret will finally be heard.

Texas, the nation's most active capital punishment state, will try to persuade 
an appeals court Wednesday to keep the Texas Department of Criminal Justice 
from being forced to disclose who provided the lethal drugs before last Sept. 
1, when the law shielding suppliers took effect.

Prison agency spokesman Jason Clark wouldn't say Tuesday whether the provider 
of execution drugs then is still the supplier, reiterating that the drugs come 
from a licensed compounding pharmacy that is not publicly identified. Such 
pharmacies custom-make drugs for a specific client, although critics contend 
they operate with less stringent regulatory scrutiny and testing standards 
compared to larger drug companies.

The availability of execution drugs has become an issue in many death penalty 
states, and Texas began using a compounding pharmacy as its source when 
traditional pharmaceutical makers refused to sell their products to prison 
agencies to be used for capital punishment. Similar lawsuits about whether 
states must identify their providers have been argued in states including 
Georgia, Arkansas and Missouri.

Lawyers for the two inmates originally named as plaintiffs in the Texas suit 
failed to block their executions in April 2014 with arguments that the identity 
of the supplier of the sedative pentobarbital was essential to verify the 
product's potency so it didn't cause unconstitutional pain. Their suit, filed 
under the Texas Public Information Act and now before the Austin-based 3rd 
Texas Court of Appeals, argues that changes in execution methods and drugs from 
"new and unreliable sources" led to botched executions in Oklahoma, Ohio and 
Arizona.

Knowing the identity of the supplier also was important to ensure an execution 
"comports with the Constitution and the awesome responsibility being carried 
out," attorney Philip Durst said in a court brief.

Although Texas had released the name of its lethal injection drug suppliers for 
years, then-Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is now governor, changed course 
in May 2014, citing a "threat assessment" signed by Texas Department of Public 
Safety director Steven McCraw. Texas law allows exceptions to the Public 
Information Act if releasing certain information would cause a substantial 
threat of physical harm.

The attorney general's office contended that a Texas pharmacy identified as a 
previous lethal injection drug supplier received "a firestorm of hate mail," 
that prison agency officials testified to an escalation of threats related to 
executions, and that McCraw warned of possible violence to and the 
vulnerability of pharmacies if they're identified.

But state District Judge Darlene Byrne in Austin rejected arguments that 
disclosing the provider's would be a safety risk and ruled in December 2014 
that it is a matter of public record.

"What the evidence should do - and does - is demonstrate that the release of 
requested information entails a substantial threat of physical harm," Richard 
Farrer, an assistant Texas Solicitor General, said in a filing with the appeals 
court.

"TDCJ's alleged claim of imminent violence is far-fetched," Durst said.

Since it resumed carrying out capital punishment in 1982, Texas has put to 
death 537 prisoners, far more than any other state. Texas also has avoided many 
of the supply difficulties experienced elsewhere. Executions in Ohio are on 
hold until at least next year because of the state's inability to obtain drugs.

Texas executions also have been carried out with no unusual occurrences.

The last 55 prisoners put to death in Texas have been executed with 
pentobarbital, a switch from a three-drug mixture previously administered. In 
the most recent 25 cases, including 6 this year, the pentobarbital has come 
from a compounding pharmacy that officials will not name.

Similar legal moves have unfolded elsewhere. Virginia lawmakers have approved 
Gov. Terry McAuliffe's proposal to shield the identities of pharmacies that 
supply lethal drugs for executions as an attempt to address that state's drug 
shortage. Inmates in Georgia have failed to overcome that state's secrecy law.

The Arkansas Supreme Court will review a lower court's ruling partially 
striking down a law blocking state officials from revealing where the state 
gets its execution drugs. A judge in Missouri, where an execution is scheduled 
for Wednesday night, has ruled that the state must disclose the source of its 
lethal injection drugs.

The Texas appeals court is not expected to rule immediately, and its decision 
could be appealed to the state Supreme Court.

(source: Associated Press)

*************

The Reverend Jeff Hood Brings the Gospel to Texas' Death Row


Bald head freshly shaven, brown beard long and flowing, the 32-year-old former 
Southern Baptist minister from Denton wears his signature stained and tattered 
white clergy robe and John Lennon glasses as he stands before several guards 
who watch him warily.

This Wednesday evening in early April, Hood is joined by 2 nuns from a local 
Catholic church, an Episcopalian monk, a former prosecutor from Vasquez's 
hometown near the Mexican border and a Sam Houston State criminal justice 
professor who's been holding candlelight vigils for death row inmates since he 
moved to Huntsville in 1986.

"I know people who work the tie-down squad, some very close relationships, and 
none of those people are sadistic," the professor says. "None of them like what 
they are doing. They don't relish it."

The last time he protested an execution, Hood was arrested for crossing the 
tape, simply raising his hands and walking forward. He spent 7 hours in jail 
before paying $500 bail.

Part of him would like to cross the yellow tape tonight, but he can't afford 
another criminal charge with 5 kids, all under the age of 5, at home with his 
wife Emily, who's studying for a doctoral degree in art at the University of 
North Texas.

Hood sits on the board of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, a 
statewide advocacy organization, but he looks at himself as an activist 
preacher willing to use civil disobedience to spread his message. He keeps 
photos of his arrests in his cluttered office, along with other memorabilia 
like his photo on the cover of the Dallas Voice, leading a protest near Oak 
Lawn Avenue last fall.

"But when I got arrested in Dallas [in December 2014], that was like nobody 
gave a shit," Hood says. "I spoke at the rally that night. I was the only white 
speaker that night. So this was when tensions [about the Ferguson, Missouri, 
police shooting] were very high. So they started arresting the front lines, and 
I was on the front lines, leading the protest.

"I'll never forget, man," he adds. "The Cathedral of Hope, those chicken shit 
assholes - I was working there at the time - didn't even announce that I had 
been arrested at church. They didn't say anything about it, because it's 
embarrassing to them. And that's when I realized that that was going to be the 
beginning of the end with them."

Hood was never officially associated with The Cathedral of Hope, although he 
was a member. He worked for Hope for Peace and Justice, a Christian-based 
nonprofit organization located in the church but not part of the church. "I 
haven't heard anything about [Hood's arrest]," says the Reverend Neil 
Cazares-Thomas, senior pastor at Cathedral of Hope. "But we're always 
supportive of members." Hood was an independent minister who's no longer 
associated with Hope for Peace and Justice because, Cazares-Thomas says, it 
closed its doors late last year. "Just because he's not with us, doesn't mean 
that we're not doing social justice work," he says.

Hood says he's anointed "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." 
"Jesus wasn't a Christian" is one of his sayings. He thinks "Jesus has a 
vagina" may be another one. "Jesus is queer" is one that spurred hundreds of 
rebukes from Christians across Facebook, calling him a "false prophet," a 
"charlatan,??? and "nothing more than a left-wing activist." Some of his former 
congregation put him in the ranks of scandalous TV evangelists like Jim Bakker. 
To some death penalty abolitionists, he's a modern-day saint, willing to put 
himself in harm's way, a reformed Southern Baptist preacher with the uncanny 
ability to draw media attention and raise awareness of their cause. His 
activism earned him the Equality Award for Activism and Service from PFLAG, a 
grassroots advocacy organization focused on issues affecting the LGBT 
community.

"I don't know anybody else who would carry [a] cross down the road from 
Livingston to Huntsville," says Pat Hartwell, a longtime death row 
abolitionist. "Jeff epitomizes what he's supposed to be doing as a preacher. We 
look to Central America and these radical priests who made these movements. 
When people enter the ministry - Catholic, Protestant or whatever - one of 
their goals is to serve the people, and Jeff has found his niche in life."

But this "modern day John the Baptist," as a supporter pointed out, doesn't see 
himself as doing anything special. He believes he's following in Jesus' 
footsteps, calling on Christians in Texas to "love thy neighbor as thyself" 
even if the neighbor is someone who murdered a 12-year-old boy and drank his 
blood.

Hood's ministry began with a startling revelation from an old mentor. He'd been 
attending school at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky in 
2007 when he received a phone call from the elderly man who served several 
Southern Baptist churches and later was affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist 
Fellowship. He was dying and wanted to see Hood.

Hood's mentor, whom he wishes to remain anonymous, had guided him into the 
ministry at a young age. Hood came from a family with money and steeped in 
Southern tradition. His grandfather developed a lucrative carbonation technique 
for Coca Cola and other soft drinks. Hood's mother was a school teacher, and 
his father was a fire chief who worked his way up through the ranks. Hood 
wanted to be a lawyer, and he enrolled in law school at Faulkner University, a 
Christian university located in Montgomery, but the call to the ministry was 
too strong for him to ignore.

He'd been raised as a Southern Baptist conservative on the south side of 
Atlanta. He'd been led to believe that Adam and Eve were real, gays are sinners 
and the fires of hell await all who do not repent before judgment day. He grew 
up surrounded by fear in his household, in his Baptist church and in his 
community of southern Atlanta which, he says, was rapidly shifting from white 
to black.

He also suffers from bipolar disorder, which sometimes means hallucinations and 
bouts of paranoia. So much of this fear, he says, was exacerbated by his mental 
condition. "The Southern Baptist culture was very skeptical of mental illness," 
he says. "If it does exist, it's because of sin. But you're sick and have all 
this anxiety and paranoia. It makes you even crazier." He didn't seek treatment 
for his mental illness until his mid-20s.

Hood's mentor, though, was a light in his mental darkness. He was someone who 
had a lot of compassion, a white guy who had served as a pastor at black 
churches. He helped Hood to explore what it meant to be from the "cradle of the 
civil rights movement" and how he connected to it. He also encouraged the Rock 
Baptist Church, Hood's family church since the late 1800s, to ordain Hood at 
the age of 22 in September 2005. In the family photo taken that day, Hood looks 
like a 12-year-old boy with thick brown hair and dimples, smiling alongside his 
mother, father and younger brother.

He enrolled at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kentucky shortly 
after he was ordained as a Southern Baptist preacher. He wanted to become a 
better minister, but he still struggled with his mental illness and his faith. 
Christianity was a religion based on love, but all he saw was hate and fear of 
anything outside their constructed norm. The university was a majestic place 
where some of his classmates, he later learned, hid their sexuality because of 
the persecution they felt they were sure to face.

"You can't live in the South and not realize how much the church has been 
implicated in slavery and discrimination," Hood says. "There are still Southern 
Baptist churches without black members, and LGBT issues are even worse. I 
always felt like Jesus ran to save evil folks. He was always going to convert 
the pharisees. That's what I wanted to do for a living. Well, there's not much 
of a living in it."

He left the seminary in the middle of the night in late 2007, driving through 
the backwoods of Tennessee to reach his mentor's home in Atlanta. He walked 
into the bedroom where he lay on his deathbed. He remembers his mentor's cold 
sweaty hand grabbing his own. It felt like death, smelt like death in the room. 
"I'm gay, and I always have been," his mentor, who was 75 at the time, told him 
before he took his final breath.

"In that moment, there is nothing else that he could have told me that would 
have been more shocking," Hood recalls. "I felt like I had never known a person 
who was gay. If I did, they were immediately kicked out of the church. It was 
really shocking and really unnerving."

His mentor gave him the charge, Hood recalls, to "never stop fighting for those 
who have no voice," and the young Southern Baptist minister soon realized that 
"spiritual people" within the Baptist faith had forced his mentor to live in 
the shadows, to become one of the voiceless, and he was determined to vanquish 
that fear no matter the sacrifice he had to make.

After his mentor's death, Hood finished his master of divinity in pastoral 
ministry at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, then enrolled to study 
church history at Emory University's Candler School of Theology, which is where 
he first came in contact with the black LGBT community. He befriended an openly 
gay aspiring minister named Lucas Johnson, who was later ordained as a Baptist 
minister with the Alliance of Baptists, a more progressive version of the 
Baptist faith. "Jeff will always be a heteronormative white boy from Georgia," 
says Johnson, who now works in Amsterdam as the international coordinator of 
the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an interfaith nonprofit organization working 
to end violence. "What I admire and appreciate is that he's not understood by a 
lot of people. It's because he knows who he is."

Hood's realization of his spiritual self fueled his journey in academia. He 
completed his master of theology at Emory and continued acquiring more degrees 
from different universities, including a couple more master degrees from the 
University of Alabama and Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, and a 
doctoral degree in queer theology from Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian 
University in Fort Worth. He sought help for his mental illness, and also 
delved further into issues affecting the marginalized and the oppressed such as 
the LGBT community, studying identity and the problem with identity, working on 
his own queer theology and exploring what it would be like for the church as a 
whole to go queer.

"Nobody would have ever imagined that I would be like this," says Hood, whose 
bald head and long beard seem to shine as he flashes a perfect white smile. "I 
would never have imagined that I would be doing anything like this."

Hood's ministry on death row began with a simple letter. Before moving to Texas 
from Tupelo, Mississippi, where he worked on another graduate degree, he'd 
taken part in the fight to save Troy Davis, an African American man whom the 
state of Georgia sentenced to die for the 1989 murder of an off-duty police 
officer. Hood's new wife, Emily, joined him. They were part of the public 
outcry for clemency, one that included notable figures like Pope Benedict XVI 
and former President Jimmy Carter.

Davis was executed in September 2011. His killing traumatized Hood, partly 
because he thought a family friend, a "good Christian man" who served on the 
board of pardons and parole, would vote to stop Davis' execution. But he 
didn't. "Even good people, when they become institutionalized, can be part of 
great evil," Hood says. "The death penalty makes killers out of even the best 
people."

He moved to Texas with Emily a few months after Davis' death so she could begin 
work on a doctor of arts at the University of North Texas. They found each 
other on eHarmony, an online dating site, and met in person a few months before 
Davis' execution, discovering they shared a love of travel and faith. His 
willingness to help the oppressed and the marginalized drew them closer 
together. They married shortly after meeting and began a family - so far, 2 
sets of twins and another child, all under the age of 5. They both make money 
being creative, she as an artist and he as a writer, but they also receive help 
from friends and Hood's 88-year-old grandfather, who still doesn't quite 
understand his grandson's ministry.

Hood's younger brother Justin points out that "Jeffrey Kyle," as his family 
calls him, has made many transformations, from a typical '80s Georgia boy with 
a bowl cut, to a star student adolescent who loved rap and country music, to a 
popular kid in high school, to a non-drug-using college frat star, to a 
troubled seminary student, to the "family man and bearded, hip social reformist 
we all know today." His older brother has been challenging the concept of 
"normal" ever since they were children, Justin says. "Jeffrey Kyle embraces 
controversy. In fact, he enjoys it."

Hood decided to write a letter to a criminal on death row because he'd always 
been against the death penalty and wanted to minister to the marginalized and 
oppressed, and show the innocents and the murderers on death row that a 
different kind of Jesus loved them: a queer one. (Not queer in the sense that 
he's a God attracted to the same sex, but queer in the sense that God is 
infinite, unidentifiable and often misinterpreted.)

In the 1st letter he sent to a death row inmate, Hood decided to include a 
picture of his family (his wife and 2 children at that point). The inmate 
responded by writing a letter to Hood's wife, asking for more photos. "I'm 
like, OK, that's probably not the guy to write," Hood recalls. The next death 
row inmate tried hustling him for money. Then other death row inmates started 
sending him letters, which is how he met Will Spear.

Spear, who's 42, claims he was mentally and emotionally damaged by physical and 
mental abuse when, at the age of 16, he killed his friend's father. "My 
self-esteem and self worth had become so low that I was willing to do anything 
to make, or keep, a friend," Spears, a large but jolly-looking killer, wrote on 
his blog. "That overwhelming desire led me into putting a false friendship 
above the life of another human being." But he didn't receive death for killing 
the man. He landed on death row for killing another inmate.

Spear, whom Hood says is Jewish, invited him to come to death row in 2013 to 
have a conversation that would eventually lead to a spiritual relationship. 
Like many death penalty abolitionists who visit inmates on death row, he says 
he didn't see a monster in Spear. He saw someone he could minister to, 
discussing stories of Jesus being imprisoned and what it was like for God to be 
on death row. "When you go back there and you look around, you're seeing the 
failures of our society," he says. "We've got to get to a point where we are no 
longer thinking that these guys have failed. We've got to get to the point 
where [we see how] we have failed.

Hood's friend and fellow death penalty abolitionist Dave Atwood agrees. "When 
you visit these guys on death row, you learn who they really are," he says. 
"Some of them are innocent, but most of them have done horrible things. But 
when you understand the circumstances of their life, my God, I've always said, 
'So here's a little kid who's been abused horribly when he was a child and he 
grows up and he becomes fucked up and probably develops a drug and alcohol 
problem.'"

The next death row inmate Hood met, Kerry Allen, was a 56-year-old child 
murderer with a clown fascination. He loved to color pictures of clowns, but he 
didn't look like one. He looked more like a scarecrow, Hood says, a rail thin, 
dark-skinned "hollow person."

When he sat down to speak with him, Hood says he thought Allen was going to 
talk about something lighthearted because he was smiling. Instead, he discussed 
his raping and murdering his girlfriend's 2-year-old child. Hood put down the 
phone in the visiting booth, leaned back and prayed, "God, I'm trusting you've 
sent me here for a reason." Then he picked up the phone, looked at Allen, who 
was still smiling, and discussed the child murderer's favorite topic: clowns.

"I want to make it very clear that I am under no illusion that a lot of these 
killers are awful human beings," Hood says. "These cases haunt me. These people 
haunt me. I've come face to face with some of our worst, and I refuse to turn 
my head and turn back because I don't believe that Jesus would come face to 
face with the worst in our society and turn away."

Along with ministering to death row inmates, Hood joined the board of the Texas 
Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, a statewide grassroots advocacy 
organization. Atwood founded the organization in the mid-'90s with a handful of 
volunteers and grew it to more than 10,000 members and supporters and 23 
organizational affiliates across Texas.

Like other death penalty abolitionists, Hood travels to the executions in 
Huntsville and stands firm against the yellow caution tape. Like Atwood, he's 
willing to cross the "arbitrary line" separating the protestors from the prison 
and spend the night in jail to make a statement. He was also willing to carry a 
large cross 200 miles to raise awareness. In the summer of 2014, he journeyed 
through the backwoods of Livingston toward Huntsville, then Austin, carrying 
the cross on his shoulder. Articles about Hood's adventure appeared in 
publications from Huntsville to New York. To Atwood, he became a saint for his 
ability to capture the news media's attention, something that comes in spurts 
over the years, depending on the nature of the killer's crime or mental 
condition.

"Thank God for Jeff. He's the best representative in the whole state as far as 
I'm concerned," he says. "A lot of these churches have official statements 
against the death penalty. The Catholics do. The Methodists do. Presbyterian, 
Lutheran. But they never talk about it. It's only on paper."

Hood's friend and fellow minister Father Fred Clarkson, a Houston-based 
Episcopalian, says another constraint on preachers' involvement is maintaining 
the institutional structure. "There is a fine line that passes as a social club 
and what is said to be church," Clarkson says. "It's very difficult to push 
that social club to do something mission [related]. I think one of the things 
that Jeff does very well is promote thought where culture is so powerful and 
has such a powerful pull over people. Jeff will throw a grenade, and there is 
nothing you can do about it."

"But it's thought provoking," he adds, "because it tackles different spiritual 
and biblical aspects all at once in a way that your culture has kept you from 
seeing it."

Sometimes Hood's aim is off, and the grenade explodes at his feet.

Pablo Vasquez bludgeoned 12-year-old David Cardenas before slitting his throat 
and drinking his blood.

Parked on a dirt road by an abandoned gas station outside of Livingston in 
early April, Hood discusses Pablo Vasquez's final moments.

He doesn't know Vasquez. He only knows the 38-year-old South Texas man is being 
put to death later today for the 2001 murder of David Cardenas, a 12-year-old 
boy. Vasquez's death, Hood says, will bring some closure to Cardenas' family, 
who've been waiting nearly 20 years for justice, but leaves Vasquez's family as 
victims of the state.

"I said in an interview [with a local news outlet] during Holy Week, that it is 
heretical for us to require blood for sin," Hood says. "You can't believe that 
Jesus' blood was shed to atone for sin and then all of a sudden believe that 
more blood is required. It creates a blood lust."

He pulls away from the prison's Polunsky Unit and drives the final path Vasquez 
will take in a couple of hours to Huntsville. He walked Vasquez's final path 
through the backwoods of Livingston a couple of years ago. It's a scenic route 
through a thick southeast Texas woodland.

"The farther I walked, the sun was going down," Hood recalls as he drives his 
silver Cadillac across the same long bridge he once crossed on foot in the 
summer of 2014. "There was a breeze flapping my white robe, and I could feel 
almost like hands were on my back as if someone were saying, 'You're going to 
make it. It's good. You're going to make it.' It was a real spiritual moment 
for me hearing the voice of love, the voice of God, 'Lo, I am among you until 
the end of the age.'"

But it must have felt like God had punched him in the gut when he realized some 
members of his old congregation from Mable Peabody's Chainsaw Repair Shop, the 
only gay bar in Denton, had created a website called "Spiritually Safe Spaces" 
to reveal what they called the "real Jeff Hood" - a straight, white, privileged 
male assaulting their culture by claiming the word "queer" for his God.

"He does not belong to a sexual minority," 1 former church member posted 
online. "He does not differ from the cisgender, heterosexual norm, and has no 
claim to that label, much less does he have the right to try to steal the word 
from the oppressed community that birthed it and change it to mean what he 
wants it to mean."

Hood didn't start the church at a gay bar. He started meeting with a few people 
at his home in northeast Denton. The more he spread the message of his queer 
God, the more people began to show up. Soon, his house couldn't hold everyone. 
He decided to move the church over to Mable's because it's "the center point of 
the queer community in Denton" and a "radically inclusive space" for everyone, 
a space where he could share his message of an unidentifiable queer God who 
loves everyone regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity or 
criminal activity.

"When I first saw a flier for the 1st incarnation of this church, I was excited 
that there would be a church which was expressly and purposefully about 
including the LGBTQ community and addressing issues they face," 1 former 
member's testimonial reads on the "real Jeff Hood" website. "Although I'm not 
Christian myself, I thought that it might be very healing and empowering for 
the large number of Bible-Belt, Christian-raised LGBTQ people who are still 
hungry for spirituality and for God but have been thoroughly rejected, 
humiliated and demonized by the Christian church at large. Unfortunately, the 
beauty of this idea was twisted into something ugly by a narcissistic leader."

Hood's gay bar church lasted less than a year. He made every mistake listed in 
the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary's blog post of "Top 5 Rookie Pastor 
Mistakes." He had high expectations of his church, failed to embrace the 
church's unique culture, invoked pastoral authority without earning pastoral 
credibility, mistook preference for conviction and showed fear or anger in the 
face of opposition. Hood's former congregation captured this failure in their 
posts.

"After working within the church for several months as an 'elder,' it became 
apparent that a lot of the leader's misogynistic white male privilege kept 
showing, regardless of how much he would hide it under a thin veil of faux 
hipster economic struggling," 1 former member wrote. "When various issues or 
statements regarding upsetting comments that could be perceived as misogynistic 
or offensive were brought to the leader's attention, they were usually met with 
a defensive, self-pitying martyrdom which was served to give him immunity from 
any and all criticism."

Another wrote, "No criticism of the pastor was allowed. If someone challenged 
his behavior, he told lies about them to the congregation. If someone brought 
up problematic elements of the church, they were immediately silenced. It 
wasn't until I spoke with other people who had left that we began to realize 
the amount of lies that we had been told about [one another]. I left the church 
because I experienced firsthand the pastor's lies, manipulation and lack of 
boundaries. I fully support a progressive space for spirituality, but I want it 
to be one that is safe."

Not all of his gay bar church members felt he was manipulative or misogynistic. 
Instead they thought that some of the other members were "injustice collectors" 
whose feelings were hurt because, in part, he didn???t check his white 
privilege enough and failed to create healthy boundaries with the congregation 
when he invited them into his home and into his personal life.

Hood's applying the word "queer" to God doesn't offend all gay people either. 
The Reverend Kim Jackson, chaplain at Absalom Jones Episcopal Center at the 
Atlanta University Center, claims Hood's 2015 book The Courage to Be Queer 
opened her eyes to her normative ways of thinking based on her culture. "I am 
black. I am woman. I am priest. I am lesbian," she wrote in the afterword of 
his book. "Ostensibly, I am about as 'queer' as one can be in this current 
American context. [...] The Courage to Be Queer is my awakening - my call to 
embrace and to remember my made-in-God's image, true queer self."

Hood didn't want to discuss the failure of his church, but he did discover the 
"real Jeff Hood" website in the summer of 2014 on his 200-mile trek through 
East Texas. "It was horrible," he says. "I'm out here about to fucking 
collapse, sweating through the damn hot road, and that's all I've got to keep 
me company. The truth be known, I really have some PTSD over it. But I don't 
want to talk about it. I don't want to have anything to do with it. What I am 
interested in is talking about the difficulties along the journey, the critics 
along the journey.

"That's been a big part of my journey, dealing with critics, dealing with 
failure, finding the church in the streets in my activism in the streets," he 
adds. "That's the story right there."

Mable Peabody's Chainsaw Repair Shop seems like a world away as Hood stands in 
front of the yellow caution tape blocking the street in front of the old 
red-brick prison. Church bells mark the hour of Vasquez's execution.

Vasquez is strapped to a gurney, apologizing to his victim's family, according 
to local news reports. "This is the only way that I can be forgiven," he says. 
"You got your justice right here. My trust is in Jesus." He looks over at his 
family. "I'll see you on the other side."

Hood isn't alone standing in front of the yellow caution tape. Other members of 
the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty join him in advocating for 
Vasquez, whom they claim is no longer the same man who committed the horrible 
crime that sent him to death row. They hold pink "Abolish the Death Penalty" 
signs with a photo of Vasquez, who looks almost angelic in his white prison 
uniform. It's a small crowd that only seems to grow, they say, those times when 
the local college students find out the news media is coming or the execution 
draws the national spotlight.

When he first arrived in Huntsville earlier that afternoon, Hood drove over to 
G & O Barbershop to shave his head for the protest later that day. Located 
inside what looks like a small trailer house, the barbershop is filled with 
memorabilia showcasing the lives of the barbers. A metal cut-out of a cowboy 
holding his horse reins in one hand, his cowboy hat in the other, and kneeling 
in front of a cross hangs outside the barbershop's front door. One of the local 
barbers shaving Hood's head compared living next to the prison where inmates 
are executed to living next to railroad tracks. "Once you live near there long 
enough, you don't hear the train anymore," she said.

One person who still hears the train is Juan Angel Guerra, the former district 
attorney of Willacy County, where Vasquez committed his crime. He's not the DA 
who charged Vasquez, but he did bring charges of murder against former Vice 
President Dick Cheney for his part in privatizing prisons nationwide. Guerra 
claims he could have proved his case if he hadn't lost his re-election bid in 
the March 2008 Democratic Primary after the news media crucified him for being 
"cuckoo," as he recalls.

Public support for the death penalty has waned slowly over the past 2 decades, 
according to a survey by the Pew Research Center. Most counties in Texas, 
Guerra points out, can't even afford to try death penalty cases, including 
Walker County, which houses the old red-brick prison where more than 400 
inmates have been killed since 1982.

Vasquez's mother had helped Guerra on the campaign trail for his most recent 
district attorney bid, which he lost. He knew Vasquez when he was a child 
growing up in the small border town of Donna, but the former DA lost track of 
him when Vasquez turned 16 and moved to California, where he fell into drugs 
and began hearing what he thought was the devil's voice. Guerra didn't see him 
again until about an hour before the execution, when he spoke with Vazquez 1 
final time.

"He said, 'Mr. Guerra, if you talk to the media, tell them that kids need to 
talk to the parents and parents to talk to the kids,'" Guerra recalls. "I know 
we know that. But unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Peer pressure. Once 
you put drugs into your system, it's like driving a car with no brakes."

Guerra offered to cover Vasquez's funeral expenses if his family wanted to bury 
him in South Texas, but Vasquez wanted to be cremated. His wishes will be 
carried out in the morning when officials ship his body to the burner in 
Houston.

As Hood and the other protesters move away from the yellow caution tape and 
gather on the corner of the street to read a poem in honor of Vasquez, the 6th 
person executed in Texas this year, Guerra recalls Vasquez telling him before 
he died, "If I had just called my mom in California and told her what was going 
through my mind, I don't think [killing David] would have happened."

Hood bows his head and prays. "Giver of life, we pray that Pablo will be the 
last person to die for a lie, to die for a lie."

Vasquez won't be the last to die. Charles Flores is scheduled to die on June 2, 
followed by Robert Roberson on June 21, Perry Williams on July 14, Ramiro 
Gonzales on August 10 and so on.

Inside the Grace Baptist Church on the outskirts of Huntsville, Hood holds 
hands with Vasquez's family, all gathered around Vasquez's body near the altar 
and praying. Nearly an hour has passed since Vasquez's execution, but no 
memorial flowers sit nearby, no photos, only a few family members devastated by 
a tragedy of his own making.

Vasquez's short dark hair is pushed back from his forehead, his face pale. He 
finally resembles the "vampire" portrayed in the news media. He looks almost 
peaceful lying on the gurney, unlike his 12-year-old victim who died in horror.

In his taped confession posted to YouTube a couple of weeks before his 
execution, Vasquez described how he killed the seventh grader. He appeared 
devoid of emotion, except for moments when he reenacted the killing. Then he 
looked at times lustful and at other times as if he were simply having a 
conversation about a dead armadillo in the middle of the road.

He beat the boy's head in with a pipe 3 times. But the boy kept pleading for 
his life. So Vasquez pulled out a pocket knife and slit the boy's throat. Yet 
he still wouldn't die. Instead he gurgled help as Vasquez lifted him in the air 
by the chin and shook him like an old rag doll raining blood.

"He was still saying something," Vasquez told Donna police investigators on 
April 17, 1998. "I picked him up in the air, and the blood was dripping, and it 
got all over my face. I don't know, something just told me to, 'Drink, drink, 
drink.'

"I took a drink of it,'" he finished, with his hands held up in the air as if 
he were still holding the 12-year-old before him.

"You drank what?" the detectives asked.

"His blood," he said before looking away. "I don't know. My face was covered in 
his blood. I flipped out because I felt weird."

Cardenas' nightmare wasn't over. Vasquez's 15-year-old cousin, who was later 
sentenced to 35 years in prison, picked up a shovel and bashed the boy in the 
face 5 times.

Huntsville prison officials sent Vasquez's body over to the Grace Baptist 
Church in a black mini-van. He was already in front of the altar, his family 
cradling one another in sorrow, when the Baptist preacher finally allowed Hood 
to enter the sanctuary.

When he killed Cardenas, Vasquez left him in a ditch and tucked him in with a 
stack of sheet metal. Vasquez's mother wails as she mourns the loss of a son 
she really lost nearly 20 years ago when the devil, he says, urged him to kill 
Cardenas.

Hood doesn't see a vampire or a demon-possessed satanist as he holds hands with 
Vasquez's family members on this evening. Instead he sees the state creating 
another class of victims with Vasquez's family.

As the Grace Baptist preacher leads the family in prayer, Hood steals a couple 
of glances toward him. He looks like a typical Southern Baptist preacher with a 
conservative hair style, wearing a suit and a tie instead of a clergy robe like 
Hood, who draws attention to himself.

When he approached the Grace Baptist Church with his robe drawn tight around 
his slim body, Hood claims he knew it was going to be one of these "born again 
salvation holy rollers" type of places. He's dealt with churches like this one, 
he says, many times in the past.

"As soon as the preacher walked up, I knew that he was ready to kick us out, 
and then he was ready to get us saved," Hood later recalls. "It's interesting 
how a Baptist postulates between getting people out and getting people saved."

The private viewing ends as it began: with tears. One of Vasquez's pen pals, an 
elderly gentleman from Germany, takes a photo standing next to the vampire whom 
he'd been visiting for more than a decade. Europeans are fascinated by the 
death penalty, Hood says, and Josefine Hinder traveled from Switzerland to 
support her German friend through his loss.

"When I first came to Texas, I was really shocked that the death penalty would 
happen here because we don't know that."

Hinder told the Observer earlier at the Hospitality House, where the killer's 
family gathered before his execution, that she met the German, who also leads 
the German Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, in Livingston last year when 
she came to visit her pen pal friend on death row. It took her a year, she 
says, to start up a pen-pal relationship with 35-year-old Juan Castillo, since 
she knew he was sentenced to death for being the trigger man in a robbery gone 
wrong. A friend of a friend of a friend had encouraged her to write him.

Like many European pen pals, Hinder thinks her friend is innocent of his crime.

"When I first came to Texas, I was really shocked that the death penalty would 
happen here because we don't know that," she says. "It was never in my mind 
that a country like the U.S. would do that."

For Hood, it's not complicated at all. The state, which is known for its 
Christian values, is wrong much like the church that ignores Jesus' charge "to 
love thy neighbor as thyself."

"Did Pablo Vasquez love his neighbor as his self by killing the little boy? 
No," he says. "But I think about the Amish where the guy came in and killed 5 
little girls, brutally killed them. It was an awful crime, but the Amish 
immediately wanted to show that they had forgiven him. Our society cannot 
continue in an ethical way, in a healthy way or even in a remotely spiritual 
way by emulating killers.

"Loving my neighbor as myself, seeking to be with those who are in prison, 
seeking to find the beauty of Jesus among them. I'm not asking anybody to have 
sympathy," Hood adds. "I'm just asking them to live out the way that they 
believe."

(source: Dallas Observer)






PENNSYLVANIA:

DA weighing death penalty in 2013 killing outside club


The district attorney is mulling whether to pursue the death penalty against a 
man who just surrendered on charges he killed another man outside a western 
Pennsylvania social club.

44-year-old Eric Washington surrendered Sunday, 2 days after a new witness 
statement and video surveillance resulted in him being charged Friday in the 
September 2013 shooting death of 45-year-old Jerome Goosby and the wounding of 
another man.

District Attorney David Lozier says Washington shot the 2 men from behind a 
dollar store after they had left the Brighton Pioneer Elks Lodge across the 
street.

Officials say Washington's cellphone was found at the scene and a witness 
reported seeing him there at the time of the crime.

Online court records don't list an attorney for Washington, who remains jailed 
without bond.

(source: Associated Press)






FLORIDA:

Death penalty debate: should death row inmates be re-sentenced?


As Florida's Supreme Court weighs whether the 390 inmates on death row should 
all be re-sentenced to life after the state's death penalty scheme was ruled 
unconstitutional, a former Florida Chief Justice, who is arguing on the side of 
giving the inmates life, is saying "I told you so."

Harry Lee Anstead was the Chief Justice of Florida's Supreme Court from 2002 to 
2004. Eighteen months after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Arizona's death 
penalty in what is known as the Ring case, Anstead argued that Ring applied to 
Florida. Other justices disagreed. More than a decade later, he was proven 
right when the high court threw out Florida's sentencing scheme, citing the 
Ring decision.

"This decision about Florida's statute being unconstitutional should have been 
made many years ago," Anstead pointed out.

Because the other justices ignored Anstead's dissent so long ago, he's now 
going to other former Florida Supreme Court justices in arguing that all 390 
inmates on death row should now get life sentences.

"This hopefully is setting things right in a large way, not a small way, in a 
large way," continued Anstead.

Anstead remains troubled that since his dissent, now proven right, several 
dozen inmates have been put to death. Gainesville killer Danny Rolling was 
among them.

"A number of prisoners on death row have been put to death in Florida. And 
arguably, they've been put to death under an unconstitutional death penalty 
scheme," says Anstead.

Ironically Lloyd Duest, who was the inmate in the case in which Anstead first 
cited his Ring objections, has died, not by lethal injection, but by other 
causes.

Lloyd Duest died in 2011, 8 years after Justice Anstead believed his sentence 
should have been reduced to life in prison.

While the 3 justices say all death row inmates should be re-sentenced to life 
in prison, the Attorney General said everyone on death row should stay there.

(source: WJHG TV news)






ALABAMA----impending execution

Vigils planned across Alabama before Vernon Madison execution


An Alabama advocacy group has organized for vigils to be held across the state 
leading up to the execution of Vernon Madison.

Without the last-minute approval of a request for a stay or resentencing, 
Madison is scheduled to be executed Thursday at 6 p.m. at Holman Correctional 
Facility in Atmore.

Madison, now 65, was charged and convicted in the April 18, 1985, slaying of 
Mobile police Cpl. Julius Schulte, who was responding to a domestic disturbance 
call. He would be the 2nd inmate executed in Alabama this year, and the 58th 
since executions resumed in 1983 after an unofficial nationwide moratorium 
prompted by Supreme Court decisions.

The nonprofit Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty in Alabama was founded 
in 1989 to allow death row prisoners, friends and supporters to educate the 
public and ultimately abolish the state's death penalty, according to its 
website.

They are still hoping for a stay of execution but have planned vigils on 
Thursday if it goes forward as scheduled.

Birmingham: A political protest vigil will take place from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. 
at the corner of Richard Arrington Jr. Boulevard and 8th Avenue N across from 
the Jefferson County Court building, on the corner of the east end of the 
Birmingham Museum of Art. This vigil will take place regardless of whether the 
execution goes forward.

A prayer vigil will be held in Kelly Ingram Park at 5:45 p.m.

Mobile: A prayer vigil will be held in front of the Cathedral of the Immaculate 
Conception at Dauphin and Claiborne streets from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m.

Montgomery: A vigil will be held on the steps of the state capitol at 5:30 p.m.

Those incarcerated at Holman prison in Atmore will show their respect and 
solidarity by refraining from sports and wearing their dress whites in the 
yard, where they will observe moments of silence and prayer on Wednesday and 
Thursday.

In France, the Action of Christians for the Abolition of Torture and the Death 
Penalty will be praying before the execution.

On all execution dates nationwide, the Birmingham Friends Meeting hangs a black 
flag from an upstairs window facing the street saying: "Today we mourn the 
death of a fellow human being."

(source: al.com)