Jessie Hoffman Jr.

Jessie Hoffman Jr.'s execution on March 18, 2025 was Louisiana's first execution of any kind in fifteen years — and its first ever by nitrogen hypoxia. Hoffman had been on death row for twenty-seven years for the 1996 kidnapping, rape, and murder of 28-year-old Molly Elliott, an advertising executive abducted from a downtown New Orleans parking garage the night before Thanksgiving. He was eighteen years old at the time of the crime.

Hoffman's case produced the most substantial federal judicial safeguard against nitrogen hypoxia to that point. Hoffman was a practicing Buddhist. His attorneys raised a Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) claim: nitrogen suffocation would functionally prevent the meditative breathing central to his practice at the moment of death — because there would be no breath. Chief Judge Shelly D. Dick of the Middle District of Louisiana agreed. She issued the strongest judicial finding yet against the method, blending Eighth Amendment and religious-exercise reasoning.

The Fifth Circuit vacated her injunction within days. The Supreme Court declined to intervene 5–4 — Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, Jackson, and, notably, Justice Gorsuch noting dissent. It was the first time a Justice from the Court's conservative wing publicly broke on a nitrogen case. Hoffman was executed at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Witnesses described convulsive movement, jaw clenching, and prolonged breathing consistent with — and in some accounts exceeding — the Alabama pattern.