Louisiana
Louisiana executes Jessie Hoffman by nitrogen gas in 1st use of death penalty in 15 years
Louisiana has carried out its first execution in more than a decade, killing Jessie Hoffman Jr. with a new nitrogen gas method that unlatches possibilities for the state to someday carry out the sentences of 55 people now living on death row.
With Tuesday night’s execution, Louisiana becomes the second state to use the gas method, which has stoked controversy among some experts and horrified death penalty opponents and other advocates. It also demarcates an aggressive new era of punishment in a state already known for high imprisonment rates.
Gov. Jeff Landry says the resumption of executions is necessary to fulfill a “contractual promise” to crime victims. Speaking on the Talk Louisiana radio program Tuesday morning, he took issue — as he has publicly before — with a “focus on the criminal, rather than the victims and the families.”
“When death row is empty, we don’t have to fill it or put another person on it,” he said. “But that’s going to depend upon the conduct of individuals, not on society as a whole.”
The state plans to use nitrogen hypoxia for the first time Tuesday when it’s scheduled to put Jessie Hoffman to death.
Media witnesses said Hoffman clenched his fists and twitched as the gas flowed. They said most of his body was obscured by a thick gray blanket, with the exception of his forearms and head. Hoffman’s Buddhist spiritual advisor chanted before the execution and following his death.
He declined a final meal at the Louisiana State Penitentiary — the prison commonly referred to as Angola — and did not offer a final statement before the execution. He was pronounced dead by the West Feliciana Parish coroner’s office at approximately 6:50 p.m.
“The State of Louisiana took the life of Jessie Hoffman, a man who was deeply loved, who brought light to those around him, and who spent nearly three decades proving that people can change,” Caroline Tillman, one of Hoffman’s attorneys, said in a statement Tuesday evening.
“It took his life not because justice demanded it, but because it was determined to move forward with an execution.”
Hoffman was strapped to a gurney and inhaled pure nitrogen gas through a mask on his face for 19 minutes. Media witnesses to the execution said Hoffman shook for a few minutes, followed by shallowing breathing indicated by the rising and falling of the blanket for several minutes before he died.
Nitrogen gas executions cause hypoxia, depriving the body of the oxygen needed to maintain its functions.
Attorney General Liz Murrill said after the execution that her office aimed to start reviewing other capital cases, though she could not estimate how many executions might take place in Louisiana this year.
“We’re going to start working our way through motions and begin to clear the underbrush and move these cases forward,” she said. “Everybody deserves the justice that the state promised to them.”
Murrill did not personally witness the execution, nor did Landry, per reports.
Kat Stromquist
/
Gulf States Newsroom
Last-minute legal challenges fail
Hoffman, 46, was convicted in a case involving the 1996 rape and murder of Mary “Molly” Elliott, an advertising executive. Originally from New Orleans, he was 18 years old at the time of the crime.
In court filings, his attorneys argued that the gas method violated Hoffman’s Buddist meditative breathing practices — his religious freedom — and that associated “terror and pain” could violate Constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
Attorneys for Louisiana disagreed, writing in various filings that courts have upheld gas executions in Alabama and that Hoffman can’t use religious freedom protections to stop his execution — only make accommodations during it.
Lawyers were filing challenges and motions in multiple state and federal courts in the days before the execution in an urgent bid for his life. But judges were not receptive, culminating in a 5-4 decision from the U.S. Supreme Court denying a request to stay the execution, published to the court’s online docket minutes before the execution window began.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, wanting to grant a stay of execution. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a dissenting opinion, wanting to grant a stay based on a religious claim.
People still say, “That’s not the Jessie I knew.” But most didn’t know what he endured at home – and that’s likely what drove him on that day, psychiatrists say.
Andy Elliott, Mary Elliott’s widower, told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that he’d “become indifferent” to the difference between the death penalty and a life-without-parole sentence after so many years, but he appreciated the governor’s “urgency toward a final resolution.”
“The pain is something we simply have learned to live with,” he told the newspaper last week. “That pain cannot be decreased by another death, nor by commuting the sentence of Molly’s assailant to life in prison.”
Hoffman’s wife, Ilona Hoffman, described him as a good dad, a “loyal friend” and “the most amazing husband” in her statement following the execution. Other survivors include his son, Jessie Smith.
At a demonstration in Baton Rouge earlier this week, Smith said his father does not resemble the person who appears in news articles about the crime that led to his incarceration and death.
“The person I see and the person I read in the articles are two different people,” Smith said. “I just wish other people would see the same.”
Kat Stromquist
/
Gulf States Newsroom
Vigils held around Louisiana
People gathered outside of the Angola prison by mid-afternoon Tuesday to protest Hoffman’s execution, including Alison McCrary, director of Louisiana InterFaith Against Executions. She has served as a spiritual advisor to people on death row.
Under a nearby tree, a woman McCrary said is Hoffman’s sister audibly sobbed.
McCrary called Tuesday a “sad day” for the state, pointing to Louisiana’s high rate of reversals in cases where a death sentence was handed down.
“Death is an irreversible punishment. Once you take a life, you can’t take it back,” she said. “And knowing that we get it wrong 80% of the time, the state of Louisiana is determined to take this risk of getting it wrong.”
Protesters also gathered around New Orleans to object to the execution and hold vigils at several places of worship, including First Grace United Methodist Church on Canal Street.
“I think our governor really has to feel that he has made a personal decision to take another person’s life,” Shawn Anglim, First Grace’s pastor, said. “I hope he sleeps heavy with that and wakes up tomorrow and feels the presence of God.”
Further challenges ahead
Alabama first used nitrogen gas to execute Kenny Smith in January 2024. Witnesses to that execution described a process in which Smith “appeared to convulse” and seemed to take several minutes to die.
Three further gas executions in Alabama over the course of the past year also involved people being executed who appeared to shake or who struggled to breathe.
Alabama officials, however, say those executions have gone as anticipated and the gas method “has been proven to be constitutional and effective.”
On Tuesday night, Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections Secretary Gary Westcott said the state had followed Alabama’s lead and made improvements.
“We actually probably did a little bit better than they did with some of the equipment,” he said. “We’ve made some tweaks to what they did. [The execution] was flawless. It went about as good as we can expect.”
Along with Alabama and Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Arkansas have approved the gas method. Arkansas approved the method on Tuesday, with Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signing it into law before Hoffman’s execution in Louisiana.
Death Penalty Action executive director Abraham Bonowitz said earlier this week that he foresees further court challenges to the nitrogen gas method.
“I’m hopeful that sooner or later, a court is going to hear the witnesses who are not state officials about the torture that suffocation execution is — and at that point it will be found to be — cruel and unusual, a violation of the Eighth Amendment,” he said.
WWNO reporter Eva Tesfaye contributed to this report.
This story was produced by the Gulf States Newsroom, a collaboration between Mississippi Public Broadcasting, WBHM in Alabama, WWNO and WRKF in Louisiana and NPR.
Louisiana Derby coverage from the Fair Grounds Race Course in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Alexander … More
Copyright 2011 AP. All rights reserved.
The races start getting bigger on the Road to the Kentucky Derby starting with Saturday’s $1 million Louisiana Derby. The 10 entries in the Grade 2 race at 1 3/16 miles headlines a big 12-race card with eight stakes races at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans. The Louisiana Derby is a Championship Series race that will award 100-50-25-15-10 qualifying points to the top five finishers with the winner and runner-up securing a spot in the starting gate May 3 for the $5 million Kentucky Derby if not otherwise qualified.
The 112th running of the Louisiana Derby is Race 12 at 6:42 p.m. ET. Race 11 is the $400,000 Fair Grounds Oaks (G2) for 3-year-old fillies with the same qualifying points awarded towards the May 2 Kentucky Oaks at Churchill Downs.
Louisiana Derby Field, Odds And Picks
The Louisiana Derby is worth watching, as 44 starters in both the Risen Star and Louisiana Derby have run in the Kentucky Derby since 2013. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th place finishers from this year’s Risen Star Stakes are running in the Louisiana Derby – Chunk of Gold (8/1), Built (4/1) and Vassimo (12/1). They will try to beat the race favorite John Hancock (7/2), who is 2-for-2 and makes his first start outside of Florida.
Horse Racing Nation’s Super Screener likes win contenders Built, John Hancock and Caldera (5/1), who has moved forward in each of his three races and finished a close 2nd in the Sunland Derby last month for legendary trainer D. Wayne Lukas. Caldera lost by a nose to Kentucky Derby contender Getaway Car.
But as you watch and wager on the races, know that only two winners of the Louisiana Derby have gone on to win the Kentucky Derby: Black Gold in 1924, and Grindstone in 1996. The 1988 Louisiana Derby winner, Risen Star, went on to become a “Dual Classic Winner” by winning the Preakness and Belmont Stakes. Howerver, 4th place Louisiana Derby finisher Country House won the controversial 2019 Kentucky Derby at longshot odds of 65/1.
Another major prep race Saturday offering 100 Derby points to the winner is the $777,000 Jeff Ruby Steaks (G3) at Turfway Park in Florence, Kentucky. Horse Racing Nation top win contenders include #6 Baby Max (7/2) and #12 He’s Not Joking (20/1), also a top longshot.
How To Watch And Wager On The Louisiana Derby
Along with wagering on the biggest races at FanDuel Racing, horse racing fans can tune into FanDuelTV for live on-site coverage of the two major Derby preps at Fair Grounds and Turfway Park. CNBC’s Road to the Kentucky Derby coverage also has live coverage of the two big races from 6-7 p.m. ET on Sat., March 22 while also streaming on Peacock.
Both races are part of the “Bayou Bluegrass 5,” with an estimated $1 million guaranteed all-graded stakes Pick 5. It starts with Race 8 for older horses at the Fair Grounds in the $500,000 New Orleans Classic featuring Breeders’ Cup Classic winner Sierra Leone, the heavy 7/5 ace favorite.
Fair Grounds Oaks Picks
If you would like to see the Kentucky Oaks favorite run one final time, then tune into the Fair Grounds Oaks Saturday. Both Horse Racing Nation and FanDuel Racing project Good Cheer (6/5) to win her sixth straight race to start her career. Good Cheer “clearly possesses the highest Super Screener Energy Reserve Index Score in this field,” according to Horse Racing Nation.
More horse racing, live betting and handicapping including the National Horseplayers Championship which was last weekend in Las Vegas. Now horse players are prepping for the biggest races on the Road to the Kentucky Derby with the Run for the Roses less than six weeks away.
You can bet on it.
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Louisiana
Effort to block second majority-Black district in Louisiana comes to Supreme Court – SCOTUSblog
CASE PREVIEW
on Mar 21, 2025
at 1:51 pm
The March session will begin on Monday with
Louisiana v. Callais. (Amy Lutz via Shutterstock)
In 2022, the Louisiana legislature adopted a congressional map that included only one majority-Black district among the six allotted to the state, though a third of the state’s population is Black. The map was challenged in federal court as a dilution of the votes of Black residents and in 2024 the legislature drew another map, this time with two majority-Black districts.
On Monday, the Supreme Court will take up the latest stage in the struggle over Louisiana’s congressional map. Defending the map, the state contends that it was effectively caught between a rock and a hard place as it tried to adhere to both the federal Voting Rights Act and the Constitution. But the voters challenging the new map counter that Louisiana never intended to comply with the Voting Rights Act, and they urge the justices to rule that the new map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander – that is, it sorted voters based primarily on their race.
The federal district court that threw out the 2022 map ruled that it likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bars election practices that result in a denial or abridgement of the right to vote based on race. The court blocked the state from using the map for congressional elections, and it ordered the state to draw a new plan that would include a second majority-Black district.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the district court’s conclusions and directed the state to adopt a new map by Jan. 15, 2024. If the state did not do so by then, the court of appeals indicated, then the district court would hold a trial and, if needed, adopt a map for the 2024 elections.
The Louisiana legislature went back to the drawing board and enacted a new map, known as S.B. 8. It created a second majority-Black district that begins in the northwest corner of the state near Shreveport and stretches 250 miles southeast toward Baton Rouge.
That prompted another challenge, this time from a group of voters who describe themselves as “non-African American.” They filed a new lawsuit arguing that S.B. 8 was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. A three-judge federal district court agreed with them and prohibited the state from using it in future elections.
In May 2024, a divided Supreme Court paused the district court’s decision, clearing the way for the state to use S.B. 8 in the 2024 election. Cleo Fields, a state senator who had represented a majority-Black district in Congress for two terms during the 1990s until he was forced out by redistricting, was elected to represent the newly drawn district.
The state and the voters who had challenged the 2022 map appealed to the Supreme Court in July, and the justices in November set the case for oral argument.
In its brief at the Supreme Court, Louisiana argues that the “divvying up of Americans by race is a stain on our Nation’s history” that “should be a disgraced relic of the past.” But the Supreme Court’s voting rights cases, it contends, compel states “to continue that vile practice today — penalizing States both when they consider race too little and when they consider race too much.”
But the Supreme Court, Louisiana says, should not even reach the merits of the case. Instead, it should hold that the “non-African American voters” do not have a legal right to sue, known as standing, to bring their lawsuit alleging that the 2024 map unconstitutionally sorts Black voters by race. Those voters, it stresses, did not submit any evidence at trial to show how they were harmed by the creation of a second majority-Black district.
If the court does reach the merits, Louisiana continues, it should make clear that states have “breathing room” “between the competing demands of the” Voting Rights Act and the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which bars the government from treating people differently without good reason.
The challengers in this case did not show that race was the primary factor behind the legislature’s decision, Louisiana maintains. Instead, to the extent that it focused on race, it only did so because the district court would have created a second majority-Black district if the state did not. And with a second majority-Black district inevitable, the state explains, the redistricting process “became a rescue operation,” in which the legislature sought to “best protect its most important incumbents,” House Speaker Mike Johnson and Rep. Julia Letlow, both Republicans. But even if race had been the motivating factor, the state adds, the legislature had good reason to believe that it had to draw the second majority-Black district to comply with the VRA.
But “the most important step” that the Supreme Court should take in this case, Louisiana concludes, is to “provide clear guidance regarding how States must navigate this notoriously unclear area of the law” so that it can “put an end to the extraordinary waste of time and resources that plagues the States after every redistricting cycle.”
The original group of challengers to the map with only one majority-Black district joins the state in defending the new map. They argue that if the state contends (as it does) that politics, rather than race, were at the heart of its redistricting decisions, then the “non-African American” voters in this case must “disentangle race from politics” and meet the “high bar” of showing that “race for its own sake” was the primary factor in the legislature’s decision to adopt S.B. 8. But they cannot do this, the 2022 challengers contend, when there was “copious” evidence that the legislature drew that map to protect Johnson and Letlow’s seats, “preserve representation for north Louisiana, and join communities with shared interests along the Red River.”
At the very least, the 2022 challengers suggest, the court should send the case back to the three-judge district court because that court should not have considered the “non-African American” voters’ request to temporarily block the 2024 map and the merits of their claim at the same time, on an “extraordinarily expedited” schedule that did not give the one-district challengers a sufficient opportunity to prepare and present their case.
The challengers to the map with two majority-Black districts urge the justices to leave the three-judge district court’s decision in place. That decision, they write, was correct when it found it “utterly implausible” that race and a desire to protect Republican incumbents played an equal role in the legislature’s decision to draw S.B. 8. The reality, they say, is that the legislature “‘first made the decision’ to impose the racial quota, eliminating one Republican seat, and ‘only then’ had to choose which Republican to sacrifice.” But if Louisiana’s true motive was to comply with the VRA, they continue, “that intent alone is evidence that race” was the primary motivating factor in drawing the second majority-Black district.
The “non-African American” challengers push back against the state’s suggestion that they lack standing to bring their lawsuit. Several of them, they note, live in the district that they are challenging, which is all that the law requires.
They also insist that the original challengers cannot now contest the procedures that the three-judge district court used. The 2022 challengers were not harmed by the timeline because their lawyers already had experience on redistricting litigation in Louisiana, they emphasize.
In a “friend of the court” brief supporting the group of non-Black voters, Alabama (joined by 13 other states) complains about a “judicially driven expansion of the VRA,” arguing that it “departs from the guardrails imposed by Congress in 1982.”
Alabama suggests that the court has two options to remedy this expansion. First, it could adopt a narrow reading indicating that members of a minority group can participate in the political process, and therefore states do not violate Section 2, as long as they can register to vote, vote, “choose the political party” they want to support, and “participate in its affairs.” Alternatively, it posits, the court could go further and hold that the application of Section 2 to redistricting plans is itself unconstitutional.
The District of Columbia, joined by a different group of 19 states, counters that the justices should not even consider the issues that Alabama raises, because they are not before the court in Louisiana’s appeal. But if it does consider those issues, D.C. continues, the court “should reject them. The Court’s settled” law interpreting Section 2, D.C. explains, “is workable and has been used by States for decades.”
Unlike many high-profile redistricting cases, the federal government will not be participating in Monday’s oral arguments. In December, the Biden administration filed a brief in which it contended (among other things) that Louisiana had good reason to believe that it needed to draw a second majority-Black district to comply with the VRA, and it sought to appear as a “friend of the court” to argue that position.
But on Jan. 24, Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris notified the justices that the Trump administration did not stand by her predecessor’s position, and the government no longer wanted to participate in the oral arguments.
This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.
BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) – Governor Jeff Landry says outdated software is the cause of “crippling delays” at Office of Motor Vehicle locations across Louisiana.
In response to these issues, the governor announced on social media that he signed an executive order on Thursday, March 20, declaring a State of Emergency. In a post on X, Gov. Landry says, in part, that this was done “in an effort to efficiently and effectively fix the Office of Motor Vehicles once and for all.”
Outdated software is causing crippling delays @LouisianaOMV for the public. This is not acceptable!
That is why today, I signed an Executive Order declaring a State of Emergency in an effort to efficiently and effectively fix the Office of Motor Vehicles once and for all. pic.twitter.com/v6RIeYmcY8
— Governor Jeff Landry (@LAGovJeffLandry) March 20, 2025
The governor highlights disruptions with the OMV’s current system including delays for the public, outages that have led to closures of offices, vulnerabilities, and more in his executive order.
Furthermore, Gov. Landry stresses that “it is imperative for the Office of Motor Vehicles to procure and implement a modernized system to effectively carry out its responsibilities.”
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