- Death row inmate Jessie Hoffman was convicted of the brutal rape and murder of 28-year-old Molly Elliott in 1996. He had kidnapped her in New Orleans after she got off work.
- Hoffman has been arguing that he shouldn’t be executed by nitrogen gas because it violates his religious freedoms.
- Molly Elliott’s husband told USA TODAY that he was in favor of Hoffman’s execution if it wasn’t going to be further delayed but said it wouldn’t bring closure.
Louisiana on Tuesday executed a death row inmate using nitrogen gas for the first time in state history and only the fifth time in U.S. history.
Death row inmate Jessie Hoffman’s execution is the first in Louisiana in 15 years after the state struggled to obtain drugs for lethal injections. Hoffman was pronounced dead at 6:50 p.m. after a “flawless” execution, according to Gary Westcott, secretary of the the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections.
Hoffman, who was convicted of the brutal rape and murder of 28-year-old Molly Elliott in 1996, had been arguing that he shouldn’t be executed by nitrogen gas, a controversial and largely untried method, partly because it he said it violated his religious freedom by preventing him from practicing his Buddhist meditative breathing.
Last week, a federal judge temporarily halted Hoffman’s execution, citing possible “pain and torture” in violation of his constitutional rights. The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the ruling on Friday. Hoffman’s attorneys appealed and on Tuesday shortly before the execution, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to stop it in a narrow decision.
Until Tuesday, only one state, Alabama, had used nitrogen gas to put inmates to death. The state made history last year with its first such execution, and has conducted three others using nitrogen gas since.
“Tonight, justice was served for Molly Elliot and for the state of Louisiana,” Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a news conference after Hoffman’s execution. “Now he faces his ultimate judgment. Judgment before God.”
Here’s what to know about Hoffman’s execution, including more about the close Supreme Court decision and how Elliott’s family feels about the execution 29 years after losing the bright young woman.
Witnesses describe execution
Hoffman declined a last meal and did not say any last words before the nitrogen gas began to flow at about 6:21 p.m., according to execution witnesses who spoke at a news conference. The gas flowed for about 19 minutes, five minutes after state officials say he flatlined.
Hoffman was strapped to a gurney, and all but his head and forearms were covered by a thick blanket, they said.
“He did move. He did shake very briefly,” said Seth Smith, chief of operations for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections. “Around 6:23 he did have some convulsive activity … After that, I personally didn’t see nothing that I would say is consistent with pain. He, in essence, was clinically dead very quickly.”
One of two media witnesses, Gina Swanson with WDSU-TV, said that she saw Hoffman twitch, clench his fists and his body jerk but said that “it was a clinical thing.”
“There was nothing really off-putting that made me feel like, ‘Well, that didn’t go right,'” she said.
What did Jessie Hoffman do?
Molly Elliott left work at her advertising firm in the French Quarter of New Orleans around 5 p.m. on Nov. 27, 1996, and walked to the Sheraton hotel garage where she parked her car. She was supposed to meet her husband at his office at 6 p.m. so they could go out to dinner together, police told reporters at the time.
Hoffman, who was just 18 years old and had worked at the garage for about two weeks, kidnapped her at gunpoint and forced her to withdraw about $200 from an ATM, prosecutors said. Even if Hoffman had let her go at that point, prosecutors said it would have been “the most horrific night of her life.”
“The ATM video tape shows the terror on Ms. Elliott’s face as she withdrew money from her account, and Hoffman can be seen standing next to his victim,” prosecutors said in court records.
After getting the cash, Hoffman forced Elliott to drive to a remote area of St. Tammany Parish as she begged him not to hurt her, prosecutors said, citing Hoffman’s eventual confession to the crime. Hoffman then raped Elliott and forced her to get out of the car and walk down a dirt path in an area used as a dump, prosecutors said.
“Her death march ultimately ended at a small, makeshift dock at the end of this path, where she was forced to kneel and shot in the head, execution style,” they said. “Ms. Elliott likely survived for a few minutes after being shot, but she was left on the dock, completely nude on a cold November evening, to die.”
Her husband identified her body after it was found on Thanksgiving Day, prosecutors said.
Hoffman’s attorney, Cecelia Kappel, told USA TODAY that he acknowledged the crime and was deeply remorseful.
More about the nitrogen gas method, court decisions
Last week, Chief District Judge Shelly Dick temporarily blocked Hoffman’s execution, saying that it could cause him “pain and terror” and that he showed a “substantial likelihood” of proving that nitrogen gas executions violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Dick cited accounts from all four of the Alabama executions that “describe suffering, including conscious terror for several minutes, shaking, gasping, and other evidence of distress.” The witnesses observed the inmates’ bodies “writhing” under their restraints, “vigorous convulsing and shaking for four minutes,” heaving, spitting, and a “conscious struggling for life.”
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has defended the method as “constitutional and effective,” and Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill has argued in court records that witness accounts from members of the news media are unreliable.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Dick’s ruling on Friday. The matter headed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which allowed the execution to move forward in a 5-4 decision.
The court’s three liberal members and Justice Neil Gorsuch said they would have granted Hoffman’s request for a stay of execution. Gorsuch said the lower courts failed to adequately review Hoffman’s claim that the method would interfere with his meditative breathing as he dies, violating his right to practice his Buddhist religion.
“No one has questioned the sincerity of Mr. Hoffman’s religious beliefs,” Gorsuch wrote. Yet the district court rejected Hoffman’s argument anyway, based on its own finding about the kind of breathing his faith requires, Gorsuch continued.
But courts, he said, cannot decide how a religion should be followed.
Gorsuch said he would have paused the execution and ordered the appeals court to review Hoffman’s religious liberty claim.
What does Molly Elliott’s family say?
Molly Elliott’s husband, Andy Elliott, told USA TODAY that 29 years after his wife’s murder, he has “become indifferent to the death penalty vs. life in prison without possibility of parole.” But he said that he was in favor of the execution if it was the easiest way to end “the uncertainty that has accompanied these many years.”
“But, his death will not provide closure,” Elliott continued. “Anyone who has experienced a tragedy of this magnitude will recognize the absolute truth − Molly’s and my families and friends lost a great human being to a senseless series of crimes, the reasons for which we still don’t know. The pain is something we simply have learned to live with.”
After the execution, he said that “we can put Molly’s brutal death in the past.”
“That’s not closure, but it’s the best we can hope for,” he said.
He told USA TODAY that his wife “was a cherished person who missed out on motherhood, a promising and successful career, and a life in the country on the property we bought together.”
“Hers was a life that was so full of hope and promise for a beautiful future,” he said. “The loss of Molly is a scar we will forever carry, and it will never heal.”
‘I miss her so much’: Remembering Molly Elliott, killed by Louisiana Death Row inmate
More executions to come in U.S.
Three other executions, all by lethal injection, also are scheduled this week in Arizona, Oklahoma and Florida. At least 11 more executions are scheduled for the rest of the year but that number is expected to go up as states issue more death warrants.
States have been looking to expand its execution methods as lethal injection drugs have become harder to obtain.
Alabama became the first state in the nation to use the nitrogen gas method last year. It’s also legal in Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma. And on Tuesday, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a bill to use the method in her state. Ohio and Nebraska have reintroduced similar legislation this year.
And in South Carolina, Brad Keith Sigmon was executed by firing squad earlier this month, the first such execution in the U.S. since 2010 and only the fourth since 1977.
Contributing: Maureen Groppe and N’dea Yancey-Bragg, USA TODAY
