Editorial: Fight against nitrogen executions should continue

It also marked the beginning of a new era in which a practice already fraught with moral significance is complicated still further by deep ethical questions over the new method the state has chosen to employ.

Plainly put, we find that no matter how horrific the crime — and the 1996 kidnapping, rape and murder for which Hoffman was convicted was indeed that — the use of nitrogen gas is an affront to both the Constitution and human decency. We urge the Louisiana Legislature to reconsider its approval. Should it not, we would welcome a fuller vetting of the new execution protocols through the courts.

Take that last point first. Both in an Alabama death-by-nitrogen case and in Hoffman’s, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on emergency injunctions without benefit of a full lower-court trial on whether the method of execution amounts to a “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment.

Courts generally place a high bar against injunctive relief, whereas a full trial could more thoroughly establish a factual basis that could convince the Supreme Court to focus on the central issue — that death by pure nitrogen gas is a cruel abomination.

We have concerns over how two judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overruled federal district court judge Shelly Dick, thus putting Hoffman’s execution back on schedule. The Fifth Circuit decision was so dismissive of the careful factual record amassed by Dick, even without benefit of a full trial, that it should raise red flags.

If our judicial system cannot take the time to answer a fundamental constitutional question, and one where getting it wrong will result in irreversible harm, what is it there for?. Be that as it may, the simple fact is that state law on human executions is now more permissive than state law on euthanizing pets, which says that the use of pure nitrogen should be only be used if the pet already has been rendered unconscious;…. [The full editorial is here.]