By AVA FAHEY
On Tuesday, March 18, the state of Louisiana killed Jessie Hoffmann Jr. by forcing him to inhale nitrogen gas. Despite the state’s repeated lies that nitrogen hypoxia causes a painless death, witnesses to Hoffmann’s execution reported that he showed clear signs of fear and distress in the 19 minutes it took for him to die. Hoffmann objected to the method of execution on religious grounds, with his lawyers unsuccessfully arguing that forced oxygen deprivation would interfere with the meditative breathing he wanted to practice at the moment of his death.
Hoffmann is the fifth person in the world to be executed by nitrogen gas, following the state of Alabama’s four nitrogen gas executions in the past year. Like Hoffmann, Demetrius Frazier, Carey Grayson, Kenny Smith, and Allan Miller all apparently suffered in their final moments, remaining visibly conscious for several minutes and violently thrashing on the gurney. Louisiana Corrections Secretary Gary Wescott said that the state chose nitrogen gas as Hoffmann’s method of execution because state officials had difficulty obtaining lethal injection drugs following a 2012 lawsuit challenging Louisiana’s lethal injection protocols, and because drug companies objected to their products’ usage in capital punishment. In order to keep killing death row inmates, in 2024, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed a bill approving nitrogen gas and the electric chair as lawful methods of execution. Hoffmann was the first person executed by Louisiana in 15 years.
Hoffmann’s execution is one in a line of executions that make up a worrying trend of executions by methods other than lethal injection, after a series of gruesome botched executions by lethal injection brought public pressure on pharmaceutical companies to cease providing the drugs to correctional facilities. As mentioned earlier, Alabama began carrying out nitrogen gas executions in 2024 despite calls from the United Nations to cease the inhumane practice. South Carolina responded to the lethal injection supply issues by requiring death row inmates to “choose” their own method of execution, offering the options of lethal injection, electrocution, or firing squad. It should go without saying that there is no instant or painless way to kill a person, and executions by firing squad cause excruciating pain in a person’s final moments. Nevertheless, South Carolina executed Brad Sigmon by firing squad earlier this month.
During Biden’s term, the Democratic Party saw a serious backslide on its death penalty policy. Despite holding death penalty abolition as a campaign promise in 2020, in 2024, for the first time in over a decade, the Democratic platform did not oppose capital punishment. “We need to fund the police, not defund the police,” it reads. Notably, the state of Missouri killed Marcellus Williams last September despite clear and convincing evidence of his innocence. Kamala Harris was silent on Williams’ killing, despite her former opposition to capital punishment as the San Francisco district attorney.
Under the new Trump regime, people in the U.S. should expect capital punishment to increase drastically. One of Trump’s first-day executive orders, entitled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” clearly lays out his administration’s intentions. The EO condemns the Biden administration’s stay of federal executions and commutation of 37 federal death row prisoners and promises to resume federal executions expeditiously. It promises to ensure that the 37 former death row inmates “are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose”—a clear violation of the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment—and promises to investigate whether any of them could be resentenced to death row at the state level. It also promises to ensure that every state has a sufficient supply of lethal injection drugs.
Most worryingly, the executive order calls on the U.S. attorney general to seek the death penalty when the defendant is an immigrant in the United States without legal status, “regardless of other factors.” With vague language, the executive order leaves open the possibility that undocumented people could receive the death penalty for crimes other than murder. By targeting undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom are Latino and/or Black, this executive order “says the quiet part out loud” about capital punishment. It has always been used disproportionately against Black and Latino people. Despite making up only 31% of the U.S. population collectively, Black and Latino people make up a majority, 53%, of death-row inmates. Homicides with white victims are overwhelmingly more likely to result in a death penalty conviction than homicides with Black victims or Latino victims.
There is a long history of the racial disparities in death row in the United States, and there are numerous studies concluding that contemporary executions occur more often in the same places where enslavement and racial terror lynchings were prevalent. Before the Civil War, it was a rare sight to see a white person executed in a slaveholding state. In Virginia, for example, there were 60 capital crimes for enslaved Black people, but only one for white people. After the Civil War, extra-judicial executions of Black people swelled as white mobs launched a campaign of terror against Black communities across the country, lynching thousands of Black people. Capital execution is a direct descendant of anti-Black racial terror lynching, and racial terror lynchings decreased only when capital punishment started to rise. While Black people made up only 22% of the South by 1950, they made up 75% of death row.
For Latinos, there is a similar link between lynchings and capital punishment. In Texas, over 5000 Mexican-Americans are estimated to have been lynched by civilian whites, local law enforcement, and Texas Rangers between 1910 and 1920, a period now referred to as La Matanza (“The Massacre”) and La Hora de Sangre (“Hour of Blood”). Today, Texas, which carries more than a third of all executions in the U.S., has killed a shocking 84% of all Latino prisoners executed in the last 40 years. If nothing happens to intervene, it is likely that this number will rise as judges and juries in Texas and elsewhere feel emboldened by Trump’s support to hand down more and more death sentences.
One can look to Trump’s previous presidential term for a harbinger of what might be to come. Trump executed more prisoners than the last 10 presidents combined. Before 2020, the federal government had not executed a prisoner since 2003. But in the last year of his presidency, Trump’s attorney general handed down 13 executions, with the final one—of Dustin Higgs, a Black man—taking place only five days before Biden took office. Billie Allen, a federal death-row inmate, said that he and his fellow death-row prisoners did not realize that they might be killed until prison guards began practicing execution protocols. “Many of us knew Trump was going to keep killing … until he ran out of time,” said Allen. One man, Daniel Lee, was executed while he had a pending appeal. At least one of the executions was botched.
It is an established fact that the death penalty does not deter crime. A so-called “justice” system with a history as racist and violent as the United States could never carry out a humane execution. For one out of every eight executions, one death row prisoner has been posthumously officially exonerated. Black and Latino death row prisoners are particularly vulnerable to wrongful convictions.
There is only one way to stop this trend of brutal executions is to get rid of the death penalty completely by abolishing the current prison system. Under a just system, non-violent offenders would be diverted into alternatives like rehabilitation, education, and treatment. Capitalism is the primary cause of crime, and as the working class, we should take to the streets to demand the end of a criminal justice system that brutally murders Black, Latino, and/or poor people instead of punishing the bosses, landlords, and corrupt politicians who are responsible for far more social murder.
