A few months after Louisiana lawmakers legalized executing death row prisoners by nitrogen gas suffocation, an effort backed by Jewish faith leaders to remove that method from state law has died for the current legislative session.
Sen. Katrina Jackson-Andrews’ Senate Bill 430 passed the state Senate with bipartisan support last month but was rejected Tuesday in the House Administration of Criminal Justice Committee, which is dominated by conservatives and has served as a launch pad for much of Republican Gov. Jeff Landry's tough-on-crime agenda.
The committee's vote means that nitrogen gas hypoxia, a largely untested method that has come under scrutiny since Alabama executed a man by that method in January, will remain legal in Louisiana as Landry seeks to restart executions of the state's nearly 60 death row prisoners. Landry advocated for that method in his February special session on crime and opposed the bill that died on Tuesday.
Jackson-Andrews, D-Shreveport, said she brought the bill in solidarity with Jewish Louisianans, whose concerns over gassing resonated with her in part because of the state's history of lynching. Hanging, like gassing in Nazi Germany, was a tool of extrajudicial murder as well as an officially sanctioned execution method in Louisiana, she noted.
"My people were hung for a number of years throughout this state," she said. "If the death penalty were to include the gallows, I would be here to say that that invokes trauma."
Several Jewish faith leaders and activists who had joined Monday's demonstration arrived in the House criminal justice committee Tuesday to support the bill repealing nitrogen executions. Gassing "unmistakably and immediately" evokes the Holocaust, said Rabbi David Cohen-Henriquez of Shir Chadash Conservative Congregation in Metairie.
But Republicans on the committee and other opponents of the bill disputed the parallels drawn by Jewish activists between murder by Nazi Germany and executions carried out by state officials.
"We're not talking about innocent women and children, we're talking about people convicted by a jury of 12," said Rep. Tony Bacala, R-Prairieville, told Cohen-Henriquez and other Jewish activists.
Wayne Guzzardo, whose daughter Stephanie Guzzardo was slain in a triple-shooting in Baton Rouge in 1995 and whose friendship with Landry has sharpened the governor's long-held support for the death penalty, told the committee that approving the bill would be an affront to murder victims' surviving family members.
Stephanie Guzzardo's killer, Todd Wessinger, was sentenced to die for that shooting — a sentence her father has fought to see carried out for years. A federal judge has since overturned Wessinger's death sentence.
The committee voted the bill down on an 8-3 vote that fell along party lines, with Republicans opposing it and three Democrats voting in favor.
A law pushed by Landry in his February crime session expanded Louisiana's execution methods to include nitrogen gas hypoxia and electrocution. The state, which has not executed anyone since 2010, has struggled for years to obtain lethal injection drugs — a dilemma the bill sought to ameliorate by shrouding details of the state's purchase of those drugs in secrecy.
Per the law, the state may begin gassing and electrocuting death row prisoners starting July 1. Meanwhile, a recent court challenge has cast doubt on whether Louisiana can execute people using electrocution.
Source: nola.com, James Finn, May 22, 2024
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
