Gov. Jeff Landry will direct lawmakers to expand methods Louisiana can use to execute death row prisoners, he said Wednesday, describing death sentences as "contractual obligations" between government and victims' families that the state has long failed to uphold.
Landry's remarks followed a report by The Times-Picayune | The Advocate last week in which sources said Landry would push for the expanded execution methods in a special session of the state Legislature set to begin Feb. 19.
The Republican governor is a longtime advocate for a return to firing squads, hangings and electrocution as well as the use of gas. Landry argues such methods would allow the state to deliver justice to victims' families by circumventing a shortage of lethal injection drugs that has prompted other states to approve some of those methods in recent years.
The death penalty is a "serious and sobering issue," Landry told reporters at a press conference at Nicholls State University where he also announced his chosen leaders to direct restoration and protection efforts along Louisiana's coast.
Louisiana last executed someone in 2010. There are currently about 60 people on the state's death row.
"There are a lot of families that live a nightmare each and every day over the tragic and senseless violence that has occurred to their loved ones," Landry continued.
A death sentence "creates a contract between the victims and the state of Louisiana," Landry said. "When we fail to abide by our promises and our contractual obligations to victims out there, how can we say that we have credibility on anything else that we do?"
Landry did not directly say which execution methods he would prefer.
But he alluded to an execution last week in Alabama where state officials put to death Kenneth Smith, convicted of stabbing a woman to death for money in 1988, by strapping a mask to his face and making him breathe pure nitrogen gas.
The procedure, the first of its kind to be used in the country, causes oxygen deprivation. State officials later called Smith's execution humane, but death penalty opponents and the U.N. Human Rights Council said they believed the procedure amounted to torture.
Legal analysts said other states hoping to resume executions would likely look to Smith's execution as a litmus test for broadening the use of nitrogen gas.
"States around us are finding ways and methods in order to execute those who have been tried, and convicted, and sentenced to death," Landry said Wednesday.
Landry last year intervened in a push by capital prisoners to receive clemency from outgoing Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, before Edwards left office. Landry, East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore and other prosecutors criticized that process as rushed, saying it had caught victims' family members off guard and reopened old wounds.
They ultimately prevented all but five death row prisoners from receiving hearings with the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole.
"I have committed myself to those families because I have sat in front of those families. I have listened to those families from all over the state," Landry said Wednesday. "They deserve their day of justice. That is what that jury has granted them."
"I, and I hope the Legislature," he added, "are going to fulfill our commitments."
Source: nola.com, James Finn, February 1, 2024
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