This week marks the one-year anniversary of Louisiana’s execution of Jessie Hoffman.
This was the first time in 15 years that Louisiana had executed a person and the first time in the state’s history that the government used gas as the method of killing. Nitrogen gas causes death by depriving the body of oxygen, essentially causing suffocation. Alabama is the only other state that has used gas to kill people.
Landry billed Jessie’s killing to the Louisiana taxpayers, claiming that it was done in the name of public safety, on behalf of us, Louisianans, and on behalf of victims.
No one was asking Landry to kill Jessie Hoffman. Jessie represents everything that is wrong with the death penalty. A human being who committed a horrible act of violence after navigating a childhood of extreme harm, he spent every day of his adulthood trying to address that harm by becoming a better person.
The family of the victim was not seeking his murder. Katy Reckdahl, editor of this media outlet, wrote an exploration of Jessie’s complex story last year.
For those of us who work on cases involving people on the state’s death row, a death like this, of someone we knew, casts a pall on the world.
The death penalty has never been about healing, justice, or repair. It has always been a tool for vengeance and is inherently political.
Shortly after taking office last year, President Donald Trump issued the Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety presidential action, taking aim at judges, anti-death penalty advocates, and former President Joe Biden — who had recently commuted the sentences of 37 incarcerated people on Federal Death Row. The presidential order also instructed the U.S. Attorney General to make sure that nothing limited states’ authority to impose capital punishment.
The very next month, Landry sat next to Trump at the Super Bowl in New Orleans. Two days later, Landry released a statement declaring that he expected Louisiana district attorneys and courts to move swiftly on executions.
Soon after, the state sent death warrants to Chris Sepulvedo, an 81-year-old wheelchair-bound man, and Mr. Hoffman. Mr. Sepulvedo died before the state had the chance to execute him. On March 18, Mr. Hoffman was dead.
Louisianans did not sit idly by during this process. Hundreds of faith leaders, businesses, and everyday Louisianans from across the state stood up against this execution. A new group, Jews Against Gassing, formed to oppose gassing, which members viewed as a reiteration of the historical crime of gassing Jews and others during the Holocaust. Veterinarians also mobilized against the execution, recognizing that the American Veterinary Medical Association, along with Louisiana and most other state governments, had banned euthanizing dogs and cats with nitrogen gas because it is cruel.
In a year of unprecedented state killings across the country, Mr. Hoffman among them, we find a small measure of hope in the clemency of Mr. Charles “Sonny” Burton, granted by Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama. Additionally, last week, the editorial board of The New York Times took a stand against capital punishment in the U.S., saying that the death penalty “is a form of institutionalized vengeance that causes a society to mimic its worst offenders.”
Gov. Landry did not have to kill Mr. Hoffman to keep any of us safe.
When the government kills its people, with full intent, mostly in secret, and our leaders go on to proclaim a great victory for themselves on our behalf, we should all be very afraid of what the government can do and who our leaders are.
Our state’s death-penalty system is a relic of the racist practice of lynching, exploits marginalized people, has shockingly little reliability in its convictions due to rampant prosecutorial misconduct and an 80% reversal rate. Louisiana has the highest reversal rate in capital cases in the country, and has the highest per capita exonerations from death row.
Its costs are also an extreme financial burden to its citizens. The report, An Analysis of the Economic Cost of Maintaining A Capital Punishment System In The Pelican State, which the Promise of Justice Initiative contributed to, provides a conservative estimate of the costs between 2008 and 2017, when “Louisiana spent an average of at least $15,600,000 total criminal justice costs per year to maintain a capital punishment system.”
Now, a year later, at the beginning of the legislative session, Gov. Landry and lawmakers can choose to turn away from a focus on vengeance and violence, to direct our state’s resources towards becoming a model in the South for cultivating healthy, economically vibrant and hopeful communities.
We want more from our resources and elected officials. We deserve more.
Promise of Justice Initiative (PJI) is a New Orleans-based front-line civil rights organization that fights for the freedom, dignity, and autonomy of people targeted and touched by the incarceration system. Through litigation, advocacy, organizing, and storytelling, PJI stopped executions in Louisiana for over a decade and remains committed to fighting the execution of human beings and ending Louisiana’s death penalty.
To learn more about the death penalty in Louisiana, click here.
Samantha Kennedy is the Executive Director of the Promise of Justice Initiative.
