Priest-Penitent Privilege

A Defense from Death Row

What happens when a condemned man finally speaks the truth of his life—and only God can hear?

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood has stood in execution chambers across five states and witnessed eleven human beings take their final breaths. He has held the hands of the condemned as poison entered their veins and nitrogen filled their lungs. In those sacred final moments, he has heard confessions of profound remorse...the kind of raw spiritual honesty that emerges only when eternity is seconds away.

Priest-Penitent Privilege: A Defense from Death Row is both a rigorous scholarly work and a passionate defense of one of the most essential protections in religious practice: the absolute confidentiality of confession. Drawing on two centuries of American legal precedent...from People v. Philips (1813) to Ramirez v. Collier (2022)...Hood demonstrates why the seal of confession is not a legal technicality but the very foundation upon which genuine moral transformation becomes possible.

This comprehensive work examines:

• Historical foundations of sacramental confession from ancient Christianity through American legal development
• Theological perspectives from Roman Catholic, Old Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Protestant traditions
• Constitutional protections under the First Amendment, Equal Protection Clause and RLUIPA
• Landmark legal cases that have shaped clergy-penitent privilege in American courts
• Practical guidance for clergy, attorneys, prison officials and policymakers navigating these sacred obligations
• Contemporary threats including legislative challenges, institutional resistance and digital-age concerns

Written by a Catholic priest in the Old Catholic tradition who has ministered to the condemned at the threshold of eternity, this book argues that if we cannot protect the sacred space of confession on death row...where fear, guilt and mortality converge...then religious liberty is conditional, human dignity is contingent, and the state's power extends into the most intimate recesses of the human soul.

Essential reading for chaplains, prison ministers, criminal defense attorneys, corrections professionals, seminarians, legal scholars and anyone who believes that human dignity persists even unto death.