Till Valhalla

You lost your final battle, Jeff. Not on a dusty road in a foreign land, not with a rifle in your hands, but alone, in a freezing concrete box built to erase you. After nearly twenty five years on death row, you faced the hardest enemy of all, time. Time wrapped in silence. Time soaked in despair. You weren’t fighting for your country anymore. You were fighting for your sanity, your dignity, your right to be seen and no one was watching.

They gave you a number. They locked you in a cage the size of a closet and called it justice. They left you under lights that never dimmed, rules that never softened, eyes that never looked at you as a man. You endured the endless noise, the constant strip searches, the stale air of isolation, and still somehow you held on. But you weren’t just surviving, Jeff. You were being dismantled. Slowly. Quietly. Deliberately.

You were a soldier. You had a name. You had brothers in arms. You once stood in formation, serving a country that swore it would never leave a man behind. But when your mind cracked under the weight of what you saw, what you lived, what you carried home in your bones, they turned away. You were brave enough to wear the uniform. Brave enough to fight. But not valuable enough to save.

And when the system came for you, it didn’t come with compassion. It came with deadlines. With red tape. With public defenders too overwhelmed to notice the cracks. One mistake, one lie, one chance never taken and that was it. You became the next name. The next date. The next man to vanish from the hallway of the condemned. This machine wasn’t built to find the truth. It was built to bury it.

Justice never met you, Jeff. It never looked into your eyes. It never sat across from you, listened to your story, your pain, your service, your scars. It saw a file. A booking photo. A schedule. It saw something to process, not someone to protect.

They didn’t just sentence you to death. They made you live it, every single day for twenty four years. You woke up each morning not knowing if it would be your last. You didn’t measure time in seasons, but in legal briefs. In denials. In the sound of footsteps that might stop at your door. You weren’t waiting for truth. You were waiting to be erased.

And still the country that trained you, that ordered you to defend its ideals with your life, had the audacity to call this justice. The same nation that handed you a flag to protect used that flag to cover the table where they strapped you down. Not for honor. For convenience.

Your execution did not restore peace. It didn’t bring closure. It didn’t heal. It multiplied the pain. Your blood didn’t cleanse. It stained every courtroom that ignored you, every official who signed your death warrant, every flag lowered as if ritual could erase responsibility. This wasn’t justice, Jeff. This was betrayal dressed in protocol.

AI generated Dall-E

And your family? They were punished too. They didn’t get justice. They got a silence louder than any scream. They got birthdays without your voice, holidays with an empty chair, memories stopped in time. You weren’t the only one they executed that night. They took a son. A brother. A cousin. An uncle. A soul. They shattered lives to satisfy a system that confuses revenge with righteousness.

This country failed you, Jeff. From the moment it welcomed your service but ignored your wounds. From the moment it rewarded your sacrifice with indifference. From the moment it decided that your past didn’t matter, only your sentence. Every second you spent in that cell, every prayer whispered into concrete, every breath taken in fear, all of it is on us.

That shame is ours. It belongs to every judge who refused to listen. Every politician who used your death for show. Every citizen who looked away because the truth was too uncomfortable. What we allowed to happen to you is a stain we will never wash off.

And tonight, that stain spreads across every flag flying over Florida State Prison. Over the Governor’s office. Over the seal that claims to represent law, order, and dignity. These flags do not honor you, Jeff. They mock you. They should be taken down in silence, folded not in tribute, but in shame. Because a country that executes its veterans does not deserve to wave its banner as if justice had been served. Tonight, that flag no longer stands for valor. It stands for cruelty. And it should make every soldier question what they’re really fighting for.

So we won’t say goodbye as they did. Not with numbers. Not with silence. Not with denial.

We say goodbye the way your brothers would have.

Sergent Hutchinson, U.S. Army.
A man who served. A man who suffered.
A man this nation should have fought to save.

Stand down, Soldier.
Your watch is over.
Rest easy, Brother. You’re not forgotten.

Till Valhalla.