'Spiritual Advisor' Doc Captures Hood's Last Execution Plea
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- "The Spiritual Advisor," a 23-minute short documentary from Rolling Stone Films and Documentary+ directed by Joel Fendelman, follows Reverend Jeff Hood for five days from his Arkansas home to McAlester, Oklahoma, to try to stop the Sept. 26, 2024 execution of Emmanuel Littlejohn.
- Emmanuel Littlejohn had been recommended clemency by Oklahoma's Pardon and Parole Board over questions about his guilt in the 1992 murder of convenience-store owner Kenneth Meers, but Gov. Kevin Stitt declined to intervene; Littlejohn, who claimed co-conspirator Glenn Bethany pulled the trigger and was by 2024 confined to a wheelchair, was executed.
- Reverend Jeff Hood began counseling death row inmates in 2011 and formally became a spiritual advisor allowed in the death chamber in 2022 after a Supreme Court ruling; he was physically unharmed but emotionally scarred by witnessing Alabama's first nitrogen-gas execution of Kenneth Smith.
- The doc was shot in black and white because, per producer James Chase Sanchez, "the subject isn't as black and white as what the state wants you to believe" — a deliberate visual choice framing the moral complexity of capital punishment.
- The film captures a brutal stretch in U.S. capital punishment: five executions in one week in Oklahoma, even as public support for the death penalty hit a nadir nationally.
- Hood's backstory — ordained as a Southern Baptist at 22 in Georgia, transformed when his mentor came out as gay, then radicalized into activism for LGBTQ and Black Lives Matter causes — is traced in the doc, which also references the filmmakers' prior 2018 film "Man on Fire" about a Texas pastor who self-immolated protesting racism.
- The closing scene shows Hood passed out on his couch with a montage of prison calls playing, emphasizing that Littlejohn was one of several death row inmates he talks to daily; a few of those featured in the montage have since been executed.
Why it matters: The film lands as U.S. support for capital punishment sinks to historic lows yet Oklahoma carried out five executions in a single week, putting a human face on the toll taken on the spiritual advisors who witness state killings. For death row families like Littlejohn's — who spent his final hours asking what the state had to gain by executing a wheelchair-bound man whose guilt was disputed — and for the clergy who counsel them, the doc argues the death penalty replicates harm in expanding circles rather than delivering closure.
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