A new federal lawsuit has been filed, aiming to stop Louisiana from using lethal gas as a method of executing death row inmates.
The Promise of Justice Initiative has filed the lawsuit on behalf of Jessie Hoffman, who’s scheduled to be executed via nitrogen hypoxia on March 18th for abducting, raping and killing Mary Elliott, 28, in 1996.
Hoffman was 18 at the time of the murder, in which he kidnapped Elliott in downtown New Orleans, forced her to withdraw money from an ATM, drove her to a remote area in St. Tammany Parish, raped her and killed her.
“The 8th Amendment of the Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment,” says Samantha Kennedy, executive director of the Promise of Justice Initiative, “and it’s been found over and over again in death penalty cases that methods of killing a person have to be painless.”
Kennedy says in Alabama, each of the four times that gassing was used to carry out an execution ended up being gruesome.
“100% of the times that gassing was used to suffocate a person that it was extremely gruesome,” says Kennedy. “It’s a pretty horrific and prolonged process, and every single one of those executions proved to be so.”
Attorney General Liz Murrill says the Promise of Justice Initiative has an uphill climb in its quest to stop Louisiana from using nitrogen hypoxia, since it has not identified an alternate method.
“What the current precedent says (is) that if you want to challenge a method of execution, you have to identify a different method or your case can’t go forward,” Murrill notes.
Kennedy points out that in nearly every state, it is illegal for veterinarians to use lethal gas to euthanize animals.
Murrill says what the group really wants to do is to halt executions altogether.
“Generally, they’re opposed to the death penalty,” says Murrill. “These are the death penalty opponents.”
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