Shortly before 5:45 p.m. Tuesday, the Rev. Jeff Hood was escorted through a maze of halls and security checks at the prison in Bonne Terre, Missouri, leading him into the state’s execution chamber. “Big door after big door closes,” he said. “Every time one of the doors closes, you can ... feel it in your soul.” He was taken into the chamber where he sat down and put his right hand on David Hosier’s shoulder.
The death warrant for Hosier would go into effect in 15 minutes. The 69-year-old was laid out on a gurney with a white sheet up to his shoulders and was wearing his glasses.
Hood said his stomach felt like it was in his throat. He first noticed that the chamber had one-way mirrors on all four sides of the room. It felt like a hall of mirrors — disorienting. But also poetic “in that no matter which direction you try to look away from who you are or what’s happening, you can’t look away,” Hood said.
Hood also noticed the clear tube that was connected to Hosier. It ran from behind one of the walls into, presumably, a room containing the execution team. Hood became Hosier’s spiritual adviser in February, after the Missouri Supreme Court handed down the June 11 execution date. A 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling gave the condemned the right to have a spiritual adviser with them in the execution chamber.
Around 5:45 p.m., witnesses were led into three separate, darkened rooms surrounding the chamber. Once corrections officers opened the curtains, they could see Hood speaking to Hosier.
At 6 p.m., Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey notified the Missouri Department of Corrections that there were no legal impediments, DOC spokeswoman Karen Pojmann said. Missouri Gov. Mike Parson’s office was asked if there was any reason to stop the execution.
“The answer was to proceed,” Pojmann said. At 6:01 p.m., the execution team administered five grams of pentobarbital through the tube in the wall.
‘Desperate for him to hear love’
On the gurney, Hood said Hosier told him, “I love you.” Though Hood had said that many times, it was the first time Hosier had spoken those words to him. “I love you, too,” Hood replied. He read scripture. Psalm 23: The Lord is my shepherd and Psalm 59: Deliver me from mine enemies.
He told Hosier he was forgiven. As Hosier died, Hood was reading the crucifixion narrative of Jesus: Into your hands I commend my spirit. Hood told Hosier that love was going to carry him through and meet him on the other side. “I was just desperate for him to hear love,” Hood said. “I wanted the last thing that he heard on earth to be love. And I just told him over and over again: I love you, David.”
“That was very important for me for him to know that because David lived a life that made love very hard.”
In his life, Hosier had multiple altercations with women, serving time for an assault, and was estranged from his children. In 2013, he was sentenced to death for the murder of Angela Gilpin, 45. She and her husband, Rodney Gilpin, 61, were found dead Sept. 28, 2009, in the hallway of her Jefferson City apartment building.
Angela Gilpin and Hosier had been in a relationship before she ended up reconciling with her husband. Hosier was convicted on circumstantial evidence and maintained that he was innocent. Hood said he was “not convinced he was innocent.” But “I am not a trier of fact, I’m a giver of love,” Hood said.
Hosier’s legal team had said there was no evidence that offered a path to exoneration. In the end, Hood wasn’t sure it mattered. The Gilpins were dead. Hosier was now dead. But he died having experienced a love he likely would not have, had he not been executed.
“I think that the liberation of David Hosier is one of answering the question of love,” Hood said.
Give ‘em hell
One other thing Hosier said to Hood in the execution chamber was “Give ‘em hell.” While the two didn’t see eye to eye on many topics, they easily found common ground when it came to the death penalty.
“I cannot honestly say that I believe in capital punishment,” Hosier said during an interview last month. ”The state says it’s illegal for us to kill somebody or for somebody to kill somebody, but yet they want to justify murdering somebody and that’s all this is, an execution is state-sanctioned murder. And call it legal.”
Moments after the lethal injection was administered, Hosier took several visible breaths. His head gently slumped to the right and then he was still. Hood said Missouri’s process was “bizarre” because it wasn’t clear what was happening when. In some other states, medical staff are present in the room or an official describes the steps.
The Missouri Department of Corrections also prohibits political speech in the execution chamber. Hood said his focus was on Hosier in the chamber, but he believes prohibiting speech is a violation of the First Amendment.
A couple hours after Hosier was pronounced dead, Hood is conflicted. Did his presence make it easier for the state to carry out the execution? Could he have done more to stop it? But he also knows “this is a system that’s not gonna be stopped.”
“The best thing you can do in a society determined to kill is to resist,” he said. He said, for him, that means writing, protesting, speaking and raising hell. It means continuing to advise men on death row and “getting in the dirt” with those considered by society to be outcasts, the throwaways, the caged and forgotten, and the guilty.
On Wednesday, it meant sitting by a swimming pool surrounded by trees in Little Rock, Arkansas, while his five children, who he said he imparts his values to every day, splashed around the shimmering teal water. And it means remembering Hosier.
“These executions, they haunt me forever,” Hood said. “David will never leave me.”
Source: Kansas City Star, Katie Moore, June 12, 2024
