Almost immediately after taking office last year, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana pushed through bills that lengthened prison sentences and eliminated parole for most new convictions. And he argued that resuming executions after a long lull would signal that the state was serious about cracking down on crime.
On Tuesday, the state intends to do that, by carrying out its first execution since 2010. It will use nitrogen gas, a method first used by Alabama last year, and legalized by Louisiana lawmakers shortly afterward.
“For too long, Louisiana has failed to uphold the promises made to victims of our state’s most violent crimes,” Mr. Landry, a Republican, said in February after state prison officials adopted a protocol for executions using the gas. He expressed hope that the state could break through a logjam in executions that was caused by legal challenges to lethal injection and the difficulty of obtaining the necessary drugs. “We will carry out these sentences, and justice will be dispensed,” the governor said.
Jessie Hoffman, 46, is the prisoner scheduled to be put to death on Tuesday evening. He was sentenced for the 1996 abduction, rape and killing of Molly Elliott, a 28-year-old advertising executive from New Orleans.
Mr. Hoffman’s lawyers were still working on Tuesday to try to block the execution. They appeared in federal court in Baton Rouge in the morning, arguing that death by nitrogen gas would deprive Mr. Hoffman of his right to religious expression, specifically the meditative breathing that they say is part of his religious practice as a Buddhist.
Nitrogen executions kill a person by depriving them of oxygen, as they inhale pure nitrogen through a mask.
The push in Louisiana reflects a broader determination among many Republican officials to apply capital punishment. The annual number of executions nationwide has stalled in recent years at a level much lower than the rate reached in the 1990s. There were 25 executions in the United States last year, compared with a high of 98 in 1999.
President Trump reaffirmed his support for capital punishment with an executive order issued on his first day in office in January. The order calls for federal prosecutors to pursue the death penalty in every case involving the murder of a police officer, and whenever an undocumented person is being prosecuted for a capital offense.
Republican officials in several states have been undeterred by the scarcity of drugs used in lethal injection, pushing through legislation that allows alternative execution methods.
South Carolina, for the first time in its history, executed a convicted murderer using a firing squad earlier this month. Before that, Utah was the only state to use a firing squad in modern times, and had last done so 15 years ago.
Alabama carried out the country’s first nitrogen execution in January 2024, when Kenneth Smith, 58, was put to death. He had survived a failed lethal-injection execution in 2022, when executioners spent hours trying to find a suitable vein.
In the second attempt, using the method known more formally as nitrogen hypoxia, Mr. Smith was strapped to a gurney and a mask was placed on his face. Witnesses said that he appeared to struggle for several minutes after the gas began to flow.
A journalist in Alabama who had witnessed five executions said that he had “never seen such a violent reaction.” Mike Sennett, whose mother was killed by Mr. Smith, called the process difficult to watch. “With all that struggling and jerking and trying to get off that table, more or less, it’s just something I don’t ever want to see again,” Mr. Sennett told The New York Times last year.
Still, Alabama officials and others have described nitrogen executions as an efficient and potentially painless way to kill prisoners that does not require an injection of difficult-to-procure deadly drugs.
Alabama has used the gas to execute three more prisoners since Mr. Smith, and prison officials insist that they all went according to plan. Steve Marshall, the state’s Republican attorney general, was among the elected officials encouraging other states to try the method. “Alabama has done it, and now so can you,” he said after Mr. Smith’s execution last year.
Eight states have authorized executions by lethal gas, though in some states it can be used only if other methods or unavailable, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Four of the eight specifically allow the use of nitrogen hypoxia.
Lawmakers in Louisiana legalized execution by nitrogen gas and electrocution last year during a special session devoted to crime. Mr. Landry, a former two-term attorney general, had centered his campaign for governor on a hard-line approach to criminal justice, emboldened by a surge in violence and other crimes during the pandemic.
By the time Mr. Landry took office last year, crime rates in the state had already steadied, and the number of murders in New Orleans had dropped in 2023 by roughly 25 percent compared with the year before, outpacing a nationwide decline.
Even so, he and the Republican supermajorities in both houses of the State Legislature pushed to undo a 2017 overhaul of the criminal justice system that had been championed by the previous governor, John Bel Edwards, with bipartisan support. The overhaul was meant to help Louisiana shed its distinction of having one of the nation’s highest incarceration rates, by expanding opportunities for parole and introducing alternatives to prison.
Mr. Landry also wanted to signal his divergence from Mr. Edwards, a conservative Democrat, particularly on the death penalty. Toward the end of his time in office, Mr. Edwards voiced opposition to capital punishment.
“It is wholly inconsistent with Louisiana’s pro-life values, as it quite literally promotes a culture of death,” Mr. Edwards said in 2023, boosting the hopes of activists who wanted to end the death penalty in the state and prompting clemency requests from nearly every prisoner on death row.
Mr. Landry, then the state’s attorney general, argued that many of those prisoners were not eligible for clemency. More recently, he said the state needed to follow through on their sentences. The state currently has 56 people on death row.
“These capital punishment cases have been reviewed at every judicial level, have had decades of unsuccessful appeals, and the death sentences affirmed by the courts,” Mr. Landry said last month, adding that it was vital to “move swiftly to bring justice to the crime victims who have waited for too long.”
Another execution in Louisiana using nitrogen gas had been scheduled for Monday, but the condemned inmate, Christopher Sepulvado, died on Feb. 23, apparently of natural causes. Mr. Sepulveda, 81, was terminally ill and his doctors had recommended hospice care, his lawyers said.
“The idea that the state was planning to strap this tiny, frail, dying old man to a chair and force him to breathe toxic gas into his failing lungs is simply barbaric,” Shawn Nolan, one of Mr. Sepulveda’s lawyers, said in a statement after his death.
Before now, the most recent execution in Louisiana took place on Jan. 7, 2010. Gerald Bordelon, 47, who was convicted of strangling his 12-year-old stepdaughter to death, was killed by lethal injection.