Louisiana has executed its first individual using nitrogen gas, a relatively new method for carrying out judicial killings that has only been employed by another state in the US that imposes capital punishment. Jessie Hoffman Jr, aged 46, was put to death at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola shortly after 7 PM local time on Tuesday evening. He was found guilty of the 1996 rape and murder of Mary Elliott, a 28-year-old advertising executive in New Orleans.

Eleven-hour appeals for a stay of execution were unsuccessful following the US Supreme Court’s refusal to take up Hoffman’s petition. In the previous executions involving nitrogen, carried out by Alabama, the Supreme Court similarly chose not to intervene.

A majority of the conservative Supreme Court justices, five out of six, voted to permit the execution to proceed. The three liberal-leaning justices expressed they would have blocked it. The sixth conservative justice, Neil Gorsuch, mentioned he would have delayed the execution to consider Hoffman’s religious objections.

Post-execution, Hoffman’s attorney, Cecelia Kappel, expressed grief over what she termed the “senseless” killing of someone who had changed significantly from the person who committed the crime. She argued he had become a devoted father, husband, and displayed considerable capacity for redemption.

Kappel criticized Louisiana’s Republican Governor Jeff Landry for reviving capital punishment in the state, noting that Louisiana hadn’t carried out an execution in 15 years.

It has been highlighted that Hoffman’s death marks the spread of the controversial method of nitrogen gas as an execution technique. His legal team contended that the process, involving the delivery of pure nitrogen to induce lethal oxygen deprivation, would infringe on the prisoner’s constitutional rights as cruel and unusual punishment.

Earlier executions using nitrogen in Alabama resulted in disturbing scenes, with witnesses reporting violent physical reactions from the prisoner on the gurney.

Hoffman’s lawyers further argued that death by nitrogen hypoxia, which would cause him to only breathe nitrogen, would interfere with his Buddhist religious practices, as meditative breathing at the time of death is central to Buddhism.

There are also questions regarding how Louisiana obtained the nitrogen used in the execution, as major medical-grade nitrogen manufacturers in the US have prohibited the use of their products for executions. Photos in ongoing litigation suggest that the corrections department secured canisters produced by Airgas, contrary to the company’s ban on supplying nitrogen for execution purposes. Airgas denied supplying medical-grade nitrogen for this purpose and stated their opposition to such use.

Before the execution, the sister-in-law of Hoffman’s victim asked for his pardon, stating that executing him was not justice in her name. Earlier in the day, Arkansas adopted nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method, following Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, with 25 individuals currently on the state’s death row.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/18/louisiana-nitrogen-gas-execution-jessie-hoffman-jr