Suffocation By Design: The Story of America's Newest Execution Method

On January 25, 2024, Alabama strapped Kenneth Eugene Smith to a gurney, fitted him with an industrial respirator mask, and pumped nitrogen gas into his lungs. The state called it humane. Jeff Hood was in the room. He knows the truth.

Suffocation by Design is the definitive account of nitrogen hypoxia - America's newest and most controversial method of execution. Written by a priest, scholar, and eyewitness who has accompanied eleven men to their deaths (including 2 of the 8 who have been put to death by nitrogen), this book documents what the state refuses to admit: that men convulse, heave, and strain against their restraints for minutes while officials insist the process is quick and painless.

From Oklahoma's desperate search for a "fool-proof" execution method after the botched lethal injection of Clayton Lockett, to the eight nitrogen deaths that have followed in Alabama and Louisiana, Jeff Hood traces the full arc of this experiment - execution by execution, breath by breath, judgment by judgment. He examines court rulings that enabled each death, including the powerful dissents of Judges Jill Pryor and Shelly D. Dick and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, alongside the judicial deference that allowed the practice to spread.

Part eyewitness testimony, part legal analysis, part theological reckoning - this is not a book that allows the reader to look away. Hood writes from three inseparable roles: the priest who held the hands of the condemned; the scholar who recorded every convulsion as evidence; and the witness who refuses to let the state sanitize what happens behind those chamber walls.

At a moment when nitrogen hypoxia is spreading to new states, Suffocation by Design is an urgent, unflinching document of what is being done in the name of American justice - and a demand that the public bear witness before another man is strapped down and suffocated in the name of the law.

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a theologian and spiritual advisor to death row inmates nationwide. He has accompanied eleven men to their executions and was the first spiritual advisor to be present for a nitrogen hypoxia execution. Rev. Hood has been profiled widely, including in the Rolling Stone documentary The Spiritual Advisor. He is the Founder of Execution Intervention Project.