Alabama Exports Nitrogen-Gassing Abomination

Alabama has long been a leader when it comes to exports. Recently, Jerry Underwood for “madein alabama.com” reported that “Alabama exports total $26.8 billion in 2024, reaching over 200 countries.” Underwood noted that Alabama Commerce Secretary Ellen McNair said Alabamians are “reinforcing Alabama’s reputation as a leader in innovation and high-quality production.” 

Unfortunately, this hard-earned reputation is primed to be irreparably sullied by Louisiana’s wholesale adoption—maybe as early as later this month—of what I’ve coined elsewhere as “Alabama’s gruesome and gasping nitrogen-gassing executions”—leading to “atrocity after atrocity” as I documented in “Alabama-torture outrage muted and unconscionably insufficient,” “Alabama arrogantly asphyxiates another condemned man,” “Alabama gas-tortured a 3rd man to death,” “Gassing humans to death is wrong,” “Alabama’s justice system treats human beings like hogs,” and, in other essays too (like “Leadership abdication and Alabama’s next execution,” “Alabama’s pro-gassing federal judge’s latest nonsensical ruling,” “Mengele-like logic underpins Alabama’s plan to gas a man to death,” “5 reasons why Alabama shouldn’t gas human beings to death,” and “An Abomination in Alabama”).  

Writing for “louisianafirstnews.com,” Keymonte Avery and Emma Simmons observed that Louisiana’s recently released—but heavily redacted—nitrogen-gassing execution protocol “mirrors Alabama’s, which became the first state to use nitrogen hypoxia in 2024. Alabama has carried out four nitrogen executions, all of which drew criticism for the prolonged gasping and shaking observed in the inmates.”  

Though “Louisiana officials argue that their execution plan is ‘similar but improved’ compared to Alabama’s,” Avery and Simmons shrewdly point out Louisiana officials “have not specified what differences—if any—exist.”   

A staff editorial titled “The shameful return of executions to Louisiana” published by “nola.com” aptly opined: “It is with deep sadness and a sense of disgust we see that after decades Louisiana will restart executions of its death row prisoners, and it will use the method of nitrogen hypoxia. No matter what one’s underlying position on the death penalty is, the use of nitrogen gas as an execution method is unquestionably barbaric.” 

Unfortunately: the staff at nola.com doesn’t get the final say as to whether the courts will countenance a fifth, flesh-and-blood human being tortured to death—cruelly and unusually—via nitrogen-gassing.

In the first instance that responsibility will fall to Shelly Dick, the Chief Judge of the United States District Court of the Middle District of Louisiana; Dick has to rule on a motion by Jessie Hoffman who Louisiana intends to gas to death on March 18. But whatever Dick decides, eventually it’ll be the Supreme Court who will—based on precedent—allow Alabama’s noxious nitrogen-gassing executions cloud to spread to another state—denigrating this nation’s moral character with additional Nazi-like behavior—behavior the long-arm of history will never forget. Or forgive.  

It doesn’t need to be this way. Rebecca Hudsmith, a federal public defender for Louisiana’s Middle and Western districts points out that Hoffman was 18 at the time of the heinous rape and murder he committed, and that Hoffman suffered through a traumatic childhood and should serve a life-term rather than face execution. Specifically, Hudsmith volunteered that Hoffman “suffered horrific abuse and neglect as a child and was forsaken by all those entrusted with protecting him.” Hudsmith has further highlighted that Hoffman “is a father with a close, loving relationship with his son, who he helped raise from prison. [And that he] has become a valued and stabilizing presence at the prison.” 

Louisiana hasn’t put anyone to death since 2010. Its death penalty has been plagued by the same systemic problems that have long raged in Alabama and other pro-death penalty states: including prosecutorial misconduct, significant racial disparities, and widespread evidence of intellectual disability amongst the death row population; some of these systemic problems with Louisiana’s death penalty are patently on display in Hoffman’s case—as Hoffman is Black, has suffered traumatic abuse that marked his thinking, and was so young at the time of his capital offense.      

Good people everywhere—but especially in Louisiana—have an obligation to speak out in protest, like the staff at nola.com, to the spread of Alabama’s noxious-nitrogen-gas cloud now trying to take a stranglehold on state executions in Louisiana (as well as in other states, too, like Arkansas, which has morbidly expressed interest in taking up this vile method of extermination).

There are many things Alabama can proudly export to Louisiana such as car parts, precious metals, paper and paper products. Heck, Alabama has even been known to show Louisiana a thing or two about baseball and football—two quintessentially American pastimes.

Nitrogen-gassing executions are quintessentially un-American and properly relegated to the monsters of history who employed it.