How Louisiana nitrogen gas executions could be affected by court ruling on Alabama

Advocates for death row inmates in Louisiana are praising a decision this month by the U.S. Supreme Court that barred Alabama from carrying out its latest scheduled execution by nitrogen gas, while Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill panned the outcome as the work of a “rogue judge.”

The unsigned 6-3 decision in the case of Alabama double murderer Jeffery Lee denied Alabama’s emergency request to lift a lower court ban on killing him with nitrogen gas. For now it places executions by nitrogen gas on hold in Alabama, the first state to use the method on death row prisoners. Alabama has put seven prisoners to death using the method since 2024.

The court declined to spell out its rationale for pausing the Alabama execution, leaving uncertain the impact on Louisiana, the only other state to complete an execution by nitrogen gas. Louisiana falls under a different federal circuit.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall responded to the high court’s decision by asking the Alabama Supreme Court to let the state execute Lee by lethal injection instead. Marshall’s office did not respond to questions about whether or how Alabama intends to defend its use of nitrogen hypoxia at this point.

But Murrill downplayed the impact on executions in Louisiana. The Republican attorney general, who has pressed to restart Louisiana’s execution chamber in earnest, did not respond when asked how the decisions could impact the state’s future use of nitrogen gas.

“The United States Supreme Court has allowed it, and there are procedural explanations for the vote in the Alabama case,” Murrill said in a statement.

“Alabama, like Louisiana and other states, wants to carry out criminal sentences and deliver long-delayed justice that was promised to victims and their families in these heinous crimes,” she added. “So the pivot in this case to another method simply signals that Alabama does not intend to allow anti-death penalty activists to delay the execution.”

Advocates for inmates on death row hope the legal developments serve as more than a speed bump for the handful of states that have authorized nitrogen gas executions.

Lee’s case involved some of the same experts from a challenge last year to Louisiana’s first execution in 15 years, when the state used nitrogen gas in March 2025 to kill Jessie Hoffman for the 1996 rape and murder of Mary “Molly” Elliott.

In Hoffman’s case, a 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court denied an application to stay his execution. Arkansas, Mississippi and Oklahoma also have authorized executions by nitrogen gas but have not used it.

Capital attorney Cecelia Trenticosta Kappel of the New Orleans-based Promise of Justice Initiative said the lower courts’ reasoning in Lee’s case applies just as well here.

“Louisiana’s protocol for nitrogen gassing is a copycat of Alabama’s, so the factual findings of the district court and the Eleventh Circuit should apply to Louisiana with full force,” Kappel said in a statement.

“And unlike the federal Constitution, Louisiana’s Constitution goes further, explicitly banning torture and providing stronger safeguards against cruel, unusual, or excessive punishment.”

Murrill has pressed local courts to clear more death row inmates for execution. No others have taken place since Hoffman, though the Legislature has set tight new deadlines to quicken the post-conviction review process for condemned prisoners. Louisiana now has about 56 prisoners on death row.

Does nitrogen gas cause ‘needless suffering?’

In Alabama, Lee was convicted of a shotgun double killing during a 1998 robbery of a pawn shop. A jury settled on life in prison, but a judge overrode the decision with a death sentence, in a practice later outlawed.

U.S. District Judge Emily Marks, who was nominated to the federal bench by President Donald Trump, at first rejected Lee’s challenge to the nitrogen gas death under the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual” punishment.

After a trial, Marks ruled that Alabama’s nitrogen gas protocol didn’t cause “needless suffering,” though she found it caused one to three minutes of “severe air hunger and corresponding emotional distress, anxiety, physiological stress, and physical discomfort.”

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded differently, saying “the overall suffering described by the district court, which lasts for one to three minutes, presents a substantial risk of serious harm over and above death itself.”

The appeals court sent the case back to Marks, who then decided that Lee’s chosen alternative — a firing squad — while not approved by Alabama, was “feasible, readily implemented, and significantly reduces the substantial risk of serious harm posed by the Protocol.”

Marks issued a permanent injunction that the appeals court upheld, reasoning that if it didn’t, the state could moot the case by killing Lee. Alabama then asked the Supreme Court to step in. Granting Lee’s challenge would be “unprecedented in American history,” the state claimed, expanding “the concept of cruelty well beyond the bounds of the Eighth Amendment.”

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the denial of the state’s petition.

Nitrogen gas vs. firing squad vs. other methods

The U.S. Supreme Court has a long history of staying out of challenges over methods of state executions. Lee’s was the first involving nitrogen gas where the justices were asked to suspend a permanent injunction issued by a lower court long enough for Alabama to kill him.

Before then, the high court had allowed eight executions by nitrogen hypoxia to go forward.

One legal scholar argued that Louisiana “just may think it’s not worth it” to pursue more nitrogen gas executions after Alabama’s response to the recent court ruling.

“The litigation in Alabama has set a road map for attorneys to follow if it goes all the way up to the Supreme Court. It’s a pretty good yellow brick road in terms of the cost, the controversy, the chaos that’s involved in dealing with such a very challenging and difficult method of execution,” said Fordham University law professor Deborah Denno.

In a recent paper, Denno argued that the U.S. has entered a new era of “crueler, sloppier, and more reckless” executions, with some states tapping older techniques like the firing squad and others approving nitrogen gas, a new one.

The last execution using nitrogen gas came last October in Alabama, when condemned inmate Anthony Boyd appeared to take longer to die than any others using the method. The Associated Press reported Boyd shaking and heaving for more than 15 minutes before the curtain closed on the execution chamber.

Louisiana lawmakers approved nitrogen gas along with the electric chair as options in 2024 legislation after the state struggled for years with access to lethal injection drugs. The choice of methods under the law is left to the state corrections secretary.

Supreme Court ‘shadow docket’ leaves reasoning murky

Some legal observers cautioned that the court may have denied Alabama’s plea for reasons not entirely related to Lee’s fate.

Stephen Vladeck, a Georgetown University professor who has studied the court’s growing use of its “shadow docket” to settle legal issues through emergency decisions, argued in an amicus brief that the court shouldn’t let that docket be used to clear a path for Lee’s execution.

John Blume, a Cornell University law professor, said the court’s actions on the shadow docket are notoriously hard to decipher.

“So, it could mean that the refusal to lift the (injunction) stay means a majority thinks the District Court and the Court of Appeals got it right. It could also mean that they might hear the case on the merits and vacating the stay would moot the case,” Blume said.

“Or it could just mean that they did not see what has (been) until this Court came along the difficult standard for a stay being satisfied.”

Blume said the court has granted the vast majority of emergency relief requests from orders staying executions.

“But most of those were preliminary injunctions,” he added. “This was a permanent one.”

Lee’s legal team with the Arnold & Porter firm in Washington, D.C. praised the decision while noting that it didn’t clip Alabama’s right to kill him, only how.

“We are asking only that the execution be carried out by a constitutional method,” the firm said, adding that the high court ruling “ensures the opportunity for a full review of the trial and appellate record before any execution proceeds.”