On the evening the federal appeals court lifted the injunction against Jessie Hoffman’s execution, I ran into a fellow prisoner outside our dormitory after work. While we waited for the officer to unlock the door, I asked him if he’d seen that night’s news.
When he shook his head, I told him, “The execution is back on.”
“Really?” he replied. “Damn. That means we’ll be locked down Tuesday. I got stuff to do in the hobby shop.”
I was not surprised by his reaction. In the days leading up to Louisiana’s first execution in a decade and a half, I found varied interest levels among my fellow prisoners. Their concern or indifference was consistent across generations and races, across philosophical acumen and spiritual inclination. Many of the older inmates reflected on previous executions; many of the younger men were oblivious to capital punishment in the Bayou State.
In 2010, when convicted child-murderer Gerald Bordelon abandoned his constitutional appellate rights and willingly submitted to lethal injection, prisoners at the 18,000-acre Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola generally paid only marginal attention to the procedure that had dominated the media for months. Bordelon was a volunteer. He demanded to die for his crime. With the exception of Camp-F, home of Death Row and the execution chamber, there was no lockdown. Canteens, chapels, club offices, hobby shops, recreation yards, and self-help classes remained active, as on any other day.
Fifteen years later, another execution induced the same reaction, despite far different circumstances. This time, the condemned was not a volunteer. Jessie Hoffman asked his lawyers to fight for his life because he did not want to die.
To the relief of apathetic inmates, persistent rumors of a mass lockdown proved hollow. Only scenic, secluded Camp-F tucked its nearly 350 residents indoors until Hoffman was dead and the guests, witnesses, and reporters were gone.
The mixed feelings generated by Louisiana’s resurrection of capital punishment stemmed largely from association. Prisoners with no connection to the 56 condemned men went about their business.
But those with even peripheral affiliation felt the anxiety, monitored the television for breaking news that a reprieve had been issued or the deed had been done. This group included the counsel substitutes and inmate ministers who worked the Death Row tiers and the re-sentenced prisoners who once sat on the row themselves, conscious of each sweep of the second hand that brought them closer to eternity.
Some men were related by blood or by friendship to someone who was executed.
Dalton Prejean Jr. is a club president, a facilitator of faith-based self-improvement courses, a pastor, and a social mentor with the Louisiana Corrections Court Reentry Program. When he was a child, his father died in the penitentiary’s electric chair. Prejean did not know Jessie Hoffman, but he was all too familiar with the death penalty’s wide ranging ramifications.
“The day it all went down, it was almost like reliving the moments up to my father’s execution,” Prejean said. “Even though I was only ten years old and I wasn’t totally aware of what was going on, I knew it was the last time I was going to see my dad.”
As the opposing sides battled in the courtroom and in the media, the most disconcerting rhetoric included consistent declarations by Attorney General Liz Murrill that Prejean described as “matter-of-fact, nonchalant, this-is-going-through-no-matter-what-they-file.”
“All I could think was, ‘Wow, they are just so callous about it,’” he said.
Nitrogen hypoxia was used for the first time in Louisiana, which startled Prejean. “When they said they were going to use the gas, I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I thought that stuff was banned! They kept saying it was going to be a painless death. How can suffocation be a painless death?”
Prejean lives in a reentry dormitory with about sixty mentees who are younger and rowdier. “Usually they are watching sports, loudcapping, going back and forth. But that night there was none of that. They were quiet all evening.”
Then, at 10 o’clock, a TV news reporter said Hoffman was dead, Prejean said. “For me personally, my heart skipped. I couldn’t believe they actually killed somebody. Was what he did so bad that he just couldn’t be allowed to go on living? Wasn’t there anything about him redeemable?”
In the week leading up to the execution, the victim’s sister-in-law also had spoken out, saying that she’d like to see him moved to general population as a lifer. “Executing Jessie Hoffman is not justice in my name; it is the opposite,” she told the Times-Picayune. She also requested a Zoom call with Hoffman a few days before his death, but her request was denied by corrections officials, the Times-Pic reported.
To Prejean, that flew in the face of Louisiana’s rationale for killing him. “If the victim’s family didn’t agree with what transpired, whose voice was the state honoring by taking that man’s life?” he asked.
David Berry’s Christian beliefs harbor no respect, he said, for state-sanctioned killing. “It’s the law, but I hate to see the death penalty reenacted.”
Berry is the coordinator of the Main Prison’s network of counsel substitutes who provide critical legal services to a local population of around 1,700 prisoners. He is also a student at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary Angola Campus.
Capital punishment advocates insist that the death penalty—applied only to the worst of the worst offenders—acts as a crime deterrent. Not so, Berry said.
“When someone is planning to rob a store for drug money, they don’t say to themselves, ‘Hey, armed robbery carries 99 years. I better not.’ The only thing on their mind is getting more drugs.”
Most people who commit crimes do not expect to be arrested, he said. Life, death, 20 years behind bars—the cost of their actions—“does not become an issue until a sentencing court pronounces it.”
The death penalty is more a political tool than a practical solution, Berry said. “It has a lot to do with the publicity that goes along with the crime, not necessarily the crime’s severity.”
There are heinous criminals on Death Row, he said. “But the telling part is that you can find crimes just as horrible—and worse—among the general population. So, obviously, the death penalty is political and applied to defendants whom prosecutors find least sympathetic in the public eye.”
Michael Stevens is a welder. He believes the law should be more black and white, particularly where life and death are involved.
A week after Hoffman’s execution, Stevens’ displeasure was evident.
“The way the state did it was not by legal protocol. Then the legislature up and changed it and made everything secret. The man didn’t even have a chance to argue his case. They rushed him right into the execution chamber.”
Stevens objected to Hoffman being gassed to death in 2025 after being sentenced in 1998 to die by lethal injection.
However, the Supreme Court ruled during the early years of the 20th century that a change in execution method is constitutional if the new method is more humane. That principle was applied when Louisiana adopted lethal injection over electrocution in 1991, and it was applied when the state adopted nitrogen hypoxia as a more humane alternative to lethal injection in 2024.
Twice a week, inmate counsel substitute Gary Boudreaux makes rounds down the five Death Row tiers. He knows each of the 55 surviving men who are housed there. Because capital cases draw the “best” lawyers, most of them had little use for substitutes before Hoffman died, beyond fetching Westlaw printouts of court rulings.
“There was no tension on the Row because the guys believed the execution wouldn’t happen,” Boudreaux said. “It had been so long and they have good lawyers. They just didn’t think executions would come back.”
Even Hoffman thought his case would be put on hold as it had in the past. He continued teaching A/A and N/A classes, and leading faith-based roundtables with nondenominational Kairos volunteers, while the inhabitants of Death Row continued debating the daytime soaps, shooting hoops and pumping iron on the fenced-in recreation yard, and doing what caged men do to keep from going insane.
Under the state’s new protocol, as the scheduled date draws near, inmates with a death warrant are transferred from the tier to the “Execution Building”—colloquially known as the Death House, which is actually a segregation cell inside the Camp-F Administration Building. There, all meals, telephone calls, movements, and “mood changes” are logged every fifteen minutes. A guard is posted outside the cell, and an armed guard is stationed outside the building.
“I saw Jessie that Thursday and he had just come back from teaching his class,” Boudreaux said. “I didn’t know they had taken him to the Death House until the next Monday (the day before the execution) when I went back.”
Prior to Hoffman’s transfer on Friday, Boudreaux explained, Assistant Warden Meghan Shipley allowed him to walk down each tier and “say his peace with everybody. He didn’t want to hear any goodbyes. No sympathy, none of that. He wanted to hear, ‘Stay strong in your faith and we will meet again.’”
The guys appreciated the gesture, Boudreaux said. “But I gotta stress this: Even after he went to the Death House, they really thought Jessie would get a stay. They honestly believed the court would grant him a stay.”
That, of course, did not happen.
A week after the execution, Boudreaux returned to Death Row. The atmosphere was “totally different,” he said. “Reality had dropped like a bomb on the men who now know that Gov. Jeff Landry “is serious about executing people, and the state will execute people. There’s no doubt in their minds about that anymore.”
For the first time in years, “there’s a lot of uncertainty, a lot of fear, a lot of anger that the state did everything in secrecy.” Conspiracy theories blossomed around exaggerated accounts of media details of “the time factor, close to a half hour that no one knows what happened or if he suffered. That’s a major issue with them.”
Eyewitnesses indicated that the death chamber curtains were closed for roughly ten minutes before they reopened at 6:52 p.m. and penitentiary Warden Darrel Vannoy announced that Hoffman died at 6:50.
Whatever speculation may agitate the frayed nerves of the condemned, Boudreaux said, “there’s no more doubt about stays or the death penalty going away. The reality is, the Governor wants these people dead.”
Few are more intimately familiar with the crushing weight of a death sentence than those who have experienced it. Fred Kirkpatrick is a seminary graduate and a Catholic peer minister to Death Row. From 1983 until his sentence was thrown out in 1994, he was condemned to die.
During his 11 years (and 10 death warrants) on the Row, 20 men were escorted in chains from their cells, strapped into the heavy oaken chair, and electrocuted in the name of the state. Kirkpatrick knew them all, and still gets choked up as he remembers.
“They were my friends. It’s difficult to put into words. The death penalty to me is legal premeditated murder. They plot it. They carry it out. It’s premeditated.”
Hoffman’s execution was an eye-opener for the men on the row, Kirkpatrick said. “It changed everything. Suddenly, a hard reality backed them into the corners.” There is now an urgency that was nonexistent before. “They want to know about the law and their appeals, what’s going to happen next.”
The heightened awareness is palpable. Life goes on, but the harshest lessons often change the focus. For a human being locked in a cage with nowhere to hide, no realistic promise of another dawn, the terrifying unknown can shred the most stalwart character.
“I spoke to Jessie a few days before, and he was taking it in stride,” Kirkpatrick said. “He knew the odds were against him but he was at peace. I’ve seen guys who could barely contain themselves. Others didn’t flinch as they walked that last walk. They didn’t want to die, but they were at peace.”
I asked Kirkpatrick to tell me the greatest fear, other than physical dying, among people facing execution. Without hesitation he replied, “The biggest concern is family and loved ones, and how the execution will affect them. Every man I’ve ever known who walked off the tier toward the chair was more concerned about the people he was leaving behind than about himself.
“Jessie was concerned about his family. He had a son. He had a new wife. He was at peace with whatever was in store for him, but he worried about his loved ones.”
John Corley, who is in his 35th year of incarceration, is the associate editor of The Angolite, Louisiana State Penitentiary’s prison news magazine. An interview about his work and life can be found here.