From: bigmongo@biteme.com   
      
   https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/death-penalty-louisiana-   
   executions.html   
      
      
   Louisiana Is Restarting Executions for the First Time in 15 Years. Will   
   Other States Follow?   
      
   Louisiana has been an anomaly in America’s death belt. Unlike neighboring   
   states like Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama, it has not carried out an   
   execution in 15 years.   
      
   Today, there are 63 people on Louisiana’s death row, well below the death   
   row populations in Alabama and Texas, but almost twice the size of   
   Mississippi’s. The last time a new death sentence was handed down was Feb.   
   10, 2023, after Kyle Joekel was convicted of the 2012 murders of two   
   sheriff’s deputies.   
      
   2010 was the last time the state put someone to death, and, in that   
   instance, the inmate chose to waive his appeals and “volunteered” for his   
   own execution. The last involuntary execution occurred in 2002.   
      
   All that is now set to change. Earlier this month Louisiana Gov. Jeff   
   Landry announced that the state would start carrying out executions again.   
      
   “For too long, Louisiana has failed to uphold the promises made to victims   
   of our State’s most violent crimes,” Landry claimed. “But that failure of   
   leadership by previous administrations is over. The time for broken   
   promises has ended; we will carry out these sentences, and justice will be   
   dispensed.”   
      
   Landry’s decision is significant in part because until recently, Louisiana   
   was part of a group I call the death penalty “swing states”—states that   
   have the death penalty on the books but have not used it for a long time.   
      
      
      
   Louisiana has been an anomaly in America’s death belt. Unlike neighboring   
   states like Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama, it has not carried out an   
   execution in 15 years.   
      
   Today, there are 63 people on Louisiana’s death row, well below the death   
   row populations in Alabama and Texas, but almost twice the size of   
   Mississippi’s. The last time a new death sentence was handed down was Feb.   
   10, 2023, after Kyle Joekel was convicted of the 2012 murders of two   
   sheriff’s deputies.   
      
   2010 was the last time the state put someone to death, and, in that   
   instance, the inmate chose to waive his appeals and “volunteered” for his   
   own execution. The last involuntary execution occurred in 2002.   
      
   All that is now set to change. Earlier this month Louisiana Gov. Jeff   
   Landry announced that the state would start carrying out executions again.   
      
   “For too long, Louisiana has failed to uphold the promises made to victims   
   of our State’s most violent crimes,” Landry claimed. “But that failure of   
   leadership by previous administrations is over. The time for broken   
   promises has ended; we will carry out these sentences, and justice will be   
   dispensed.”   
      
   Landry’s decision is significant in part because until recently, Louisiana   
   was part of a group I call the death penalty “swing states”—states that   
   have the death penalty on the books but have not used it for a long time.   
      
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   That group of states—which includes California, Idaho, Kentucky, North   
   Carolina, Nevada, Montana, Pennsylvania, and Utah—holds the key to capital   
   punishment’s future in this country. And if more of them follow   
   Louisiana’s example, then executions, which have declined significantly   
   over the past several decades, will again become a regular occurrence in   
   this country.   
      
   Abolitionists have long believed that moratoria on executions, whether   
   formal or informal, are a stepping stone toward ending the death penalty.   
   The longer a state goes without executing anyone, the more its citizens   
   see they can live well without it and the more room political leaders have   
   to abolish it.   
      
   Louisiana’s example suggests that two factors play a key role in   
   restarting the machinery of death: the identification of a new and   
   supposedly humane execution method, and a raw political calculus.   
      
   Before looking at how those factors played out in Louisiana, let me say a   
   bit about what has transpired there in the brief time since Landry’s   
   announcement.   
      
   As the Death Penalty Information Center reports, “Within one day of Gov.   
   Landry’s announce­ment, mul­ti­ple dis­trict attor­neys in Louisiana   
   began   
   request­ing exe­cu­tion dates for pris­on­ers.” On Feb. 11, a local   
   district   
   attorney went to court and quickly secured an exe­cu­tion date of March 17   
   for Christopher Sepulvado.   
      
   Sepulvado is 81 years old. He received a death sentence in 1993 for the   
   murder of his 6-year-old stepson. His execution was first set to occur in   
   2013.   
      
   “Since then,” as a local news station reports, “several dates have come   
   and gone as lawyers questioned the use of lethal injections.”   
      
   The same day that the prosecutor in Sepulvado’s case got a new execution   
   date for him, the district attorney in a different Louisianna parish got a   
   judge to set March 18 as the date for Jessie Hoffman’s execution. Hoffman   
   was convicted of rape and murder in 1996.   
      
   As the prosecutor in Hoffman’s case explained, he moved quickly because ​   
   “the only rea­son why [his sen­tence] hasn’t been car­ried out is   
   because   
   there was not a means to execute the sentence.”   
      
   The story would likely be the same in several other death penalty swing   
   states, especially where executions were put on hold because of   
   difficulties obtaining drugs needed to carry out lethal injection   
   executions.   
      
   After 2010, capital punishment in Louisiana came to a halt when its   
   Department of Corrections confirmed that it did not have, and could not   
   get, sodium thiopental, one of the three drugs specified in its lethal   
   injection protocol.   
      
   During his term as the state’s attorney general, Landry used that problem   
   to score political points, blaming then-Gov. John Bel Edwards for failing   
   to support legislation to authorize additional execution methods in the   
   state. “You make the unremarkable observation that other methods of   
   execution ‘are not allowed by Louisiana law,’ ” Landry wrote in a letter   
   to the governor. “While this is true, you avoid the simple truth that the   
   law can be changed.”   
      
   “I ask,” Landry wrote, “where do you stand? If you truly stand with crime   
   victims and their families, then you will affirm your support with   
   action.” During his campaign for governor, Landry returned again and again   
   to this call for action, so often that Rolling Stone dubbed him   
   “execution-happy.”   
      
   “We haven’t executed anyone since 2010,” Landry said in a June 2023   
      
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