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Producer James Chase Sanchez is used to people thinking their stories are worthy of a documentary. When Reverend Jeff Hood \u2014 a spiritual advisor who accompanies men on death row \u2014 reached out to him on Facebook, though, he was intrigued. \u201cHe sent a DM to see if we wanted to do a doc on him,\u201d says Sanzhez, of Texas\u2019s a Pound of Snow Productions. \u201cThere\u2019s so many people that say, \u2018I think you should do a documentary about my work,\u2019 and you roll your eyes. But that\u2019s not Jeff. He believes he\u2019s doing important work and he wants people to see that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The result is The Spiritual Advisor<\/em>, a short documentary made in partnership with Rolling Stone Films and Documentary+ that follows Hood for five days as he travels from his home in Arkansas to McAlester, Oklahoma, to try to stop the execution of a man named Emmanuel Littlejohn. As his guilt was in question, Littlejohn had been recommended clemency by the state\u2019s Pardon and Parole Board, but Gov. Kevin Stitt had yet to stay his Sept. 26, 2024 execution. The doc sees Hood appealing to the local government, leading protests, and comforting Littlejohn\u2019s family. It\u2019s 23 minutes of passion and prayer, a slice of a life of painful purpose.<\/p>\n More from Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n The film \u2014 which was shot and directed by Sanchez\u2019s business partner, Joel Fendelman, and is available now to stream on Rolling Stone<\/em>\u2018s YouTube<\/a> and the Documentary+ platform \u2014 was made in partnership with a March 2025 feature I wrote about Hood titled The Last Face Death Row Inmates See<\/em><\/a>. Around the time Hood reached out to Sanchez and Fendelman, I was talking to Hood weekly, delving into his life and work. I\u2019d first spoken<\/a> to him after he stood by death row prisoner Kenneth Smith as the Alabama inmate became the first man to die by nitrogen gas, a then-untested process that could have killed Hood if the gas were to leak. Hood was physically unharmed, but was scarred by the experience of watching a man who had become his friend die slowly.<\/p>\n Sanchez and Fendelman had worked with Hood previously, on 2018\u2019s Man on Fire<\/em><\/a>, a documentary about a Texas pastor named Charles Moore who self-emolated<\/a> in 2014 in protest of racism. Hood appears in that film, as he was outspoken about the pastor\u2019s death \u2014 adamant that he\u2019d not died in vain. \u201cI was really puzzled by Jeff; he was someone who I perceived as very radical, especially in relation to the rest of Texas,\u201d says Sanchez. \u201cHe challenges you. I think I was a little afraid of Jeff, or intimidated by him, at first, and then really learned to love him and his persona, which is really big.\u201d<\/p>\n The pair stayed in touch with Hood, but they started seeing his face all over Twitter, and discussing Smith\u2019s death. They were already considering reaching out when Hood\u2019s DM hit their inbox. Despite knowing a bit about Hood\u2019s work, the filmmakers didn\u2019t know much about the capital punishment. \u201cLike most people, the death penalty was something that\u2019s over the mountain for me,\u201d Fendelman says. \u201cSo being in Oklahoma with Jeff the five days leading up to the execution, it was very profound. I\u2019ve been sitting with the questions that Jeff brings up for a while. Do we have the right to kill someone?\u201d<\/p>\n The doc was shot in black and white for that reason. \u201cWhat you\u2019re seeing is mostly different shades of gray,\u201d says Sanchez. \u201cBeacause the subject isn\u2019t as black and white as what the state wants you to believe.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the course of shooting the doc, Sanchez and Fendelman learned about Hood\u2019s past \u2014 how he grew up hyper-religious in Georgia and was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister at 22, how he had an awakening when his mentor came out to him as gay. \u201cI talk about it like the queer Jesus saved my soul,\u201d Hood told me. \u201cAll of a sudden something happened within me that transformed me. It really felt like I got saved \u2014 from this sort of backwards thinking and trying to compartmentalize people and trying to suffocate people with my own ideations of what they were supposed to be.\u201d<\/p>\n From there on out, Hood became a kind of radical, liberal man of the cloth, rallying for gay and trans rights, Black Lives Matter, and, finally, becoming a spiritual advisor to men on death row in 2022 after the Supreme Court ruled that folks could have one accompany them to the death chamber. (Hood had been counseling men sentenced to death since 2011.) By the time Hood started talking to both me and the filmmakers, support for the death penalty was at a nadir in the U.S., although executions continued apace. America was in the midst of a particularly brutal schedule of executions when we arrived in McAlester, Oklahoma: five in one week<\/a>.<\/p>\n In the doc, Hood is a dervish, conducting press conferences, collecting signatures in support of Littlejohn to present to Gov. Stitt, and joking with Littlejohn\u2019s family to keep their spirits up. Still, on the morning of the execution, the Governor had yet to step in and save Littlejohn\u2019s life. He had been sentenced to death for the 1992 murder of convenience-store owner Kenneth Meers in a robbery gone sideways. Littlejohn claimed innocence, though, alleging that his co-conspirator Glenn Bethany pulled the trigger. Bethany got life in prison. Innocent or not, in 2025 Littlejohn was confined to a wheelchair, leading his family to wonder what the State had to gain in killing him.<\/p>\n