Louisiana Carries Out First Execution in 15 Years After Supreme Court Appeal Fails

Justice Gorsuch dissented, saying the court should stay execution to weigh whether a federal law protecting religious exercise was being violated.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola on Aug. 5, 2008. Judi Bottoni/AP Photo

Louisiana executed Jessie Hoffman on March 18, hours after the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5–4 to deny his request to halt the state’s first execution using nitrogen gas, which he argued would violate his Buddhist beliefs.

Hoffman, 46, was pronounced dead at 6:50 p.m. local time at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. He did not issue a final statement and declined a last meal. An official described the 19-minute execution process as flawless. It was the state’s first execution in 15 years and the fifth in the United States to use nitrogen gas.

Hoffman was convicted of first-degree murder in the 1996 death of Mary “Molly” Elliott, a 28-year-old advertising executive who was killed in New Orleans.

Hoffman kidnapped her at gunpoint, took her to an ATM, forced her to withdraw $200, and robbed her, Louisiana Solicitor General Benjamin Aguinaga wrote in a brief. He then forced her to kneel and shot her in the head, “execution-style,” according to the brief.

Earlier in the day on March 18, the Supreme Court rejected the inmate’s request for a stay of execution. Hours before that, a state judge also declined to issue a stay.

Hoffman separately filed a petition with the nation’s highest court on March 16 asking the justices to review his case, but at the time the stay was denied, the petition had not been acted upon.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson indicated they would have granted the stay but did not explain why.

Justice Neil Gorsuch filed a two-page opinion dissenting from the court’s unsigned order denying the stay.

Hoffman argued that the execution method, known as nitrogen hypoxia, ran afoul of his rights under the federal Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) of 2000.

Congress passed the law “to protect the religious-freedom rights of persons institutionalized in facilities like prisons, jails, juvenile facilities, state-run nursing homes and facilities for people with disabilities,” according to a U.S. Department of Justice report from 2020.

Although Hoffman said the forced inhalation of nitrogen would hamper his exercise of religion “by interfering with his meditative breathing as he dies,” a federal district court dismissed his claim under the federal statute and made its own determination “about the kind of breathing Mr. Hoffman’s faith requires,” Gorsuch wrote.

In doing so, that court ignored “the fundamental principle that courts have ‘no license to declare ... whether an adherent has “correctly perceived” the commands of his religion,’” Gorsuch wrote, citing a Supreme Court ruling from 2018.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit then “failed to confront the district court’s apparent legal error—or even to mention the RLUIPA claim Mr. Hoffman pressed on appeal.”

The circuit court’s “unexplained omission leaves this Court poorly positioned to assess it,” the justice wrote.

Gorsuch wrote that he would have granted the stay and the petition and vacated the Fifth Circuit’s judgment, sending the case back to that court with instructions to address the RLUIPA claim.

In his emergency application for a stay of execution filed on March 16, Hoffman said his lawyers had argued that execution by nitrogen gas violated both RLUIPA and the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The federal district court blocked the execution after finding that Hoffman would probably succeed on his Eighth Amendment claim because “nitrogen gassing superadds psychological terror compared to execution by firing squad,” an alternate execution method Hoffman proposed, the application said.

On March 14, the Fifth Circuit overturned the injunction and “misapplied the Eighth Amendment and ignored the district court’s factual findings on the central issue of psychological terror.” The circuit court also “completely ignored” the claim under RLUIPA, the application said.

In Louisiana’s brief, Aguinaga wrote that the Supreme Court should deny Hoffman’s stay application.

Hoffman provided “no reason to depart from this Court’s and others’ judgments in uniformly denying stays of execution by nitrogen hypoxia, which (again, everyone agrees) is physically painless,” the brief said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.