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U.S. | 'I comfort death row inmates in their final moments - the execution room is like a house of horrors'

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Reverend Jeff Hood, 40, wants to help condemned inmates 'feel human again' and vows to continue his efforts to befriend murderers in spite of death threats against his family A reverend who has made it his mission to comfort death row inmates in their final days has revealed the '"moral torture" his endeavor entails. Reverend Dr. Jeff Hood, 40, lives with his wife and five children in Little Rock, Arkansas. But away from his normal home life, he can suddenly find himself holding the shoulder of a murderer inside an execution chamber, moments away from the end of their life. 

Todd Willingham remembered at 16th Annual March to Abolish the Death Penalty


16th Annual March to Abolish the Death Penalty Oct 24, 2015 in Austin, Texas
16th Annual March to Abolish the Death Penalty Oct 24, 2015 in Austin, Texas.
Photo: Todd Willinghma - Innocent and Executed (Facebook Group)

Todd Willingham was remembered by anti-death penalty supporters and activists at the 16th Annual March to Abolish the Death Penalty on October 24, 2015, on the South Steps of the Texas Capitol.

Six exonerated death row survivors lead the 16th Annual March to Abolish the Death Penalty: Alfred Dewayne Brown, Ron Keine, Shujaa Graham, Sabrina Butler, Gary Drinkard, and Edward Mpagi. (More here)

In addition to these six living, breathing survivors of death row, some people at the march carried photos of Cameron Todd Willingham, an innocent person executed by the State of Texas in 2004.

Recommended reading:

  • Trial By Fire, The New Yorker, David Grann, September 7, 2009 - The fire moved quickly through the house, a one-story wood-frame structure in a working-class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky. Buffie Barbee, who was eleven years old and lived two houses down, was playing in her back yard when she smelled the smoke. She ran inside and told her mother, Diane, and they hurried up the street; that’s when they saw the smoldering house and Cameron Todd Willingham standing on the front porch, wearing only a pair of jeans, his chest blackened with soot, his hair and eyelids singed. He was screaming, “My babies are burning up!” His children—Karmon and Kameron, who were one-year-old twin girls, and two-year-old Amber—were trapped inside...

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