Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) reprieved three condemned state prisoners on February 13, 2025, pushing their execution dates years down the road to give the state time to fix its broken supply chain of lethal injections drug. But Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry (R) apparently gave up on that method of execution, and the state used nitrogen hypoxia for its most recent killing, days after a federal court appeals court gave the green light on March 14, 2025. Arizona also resumed executions on March 19, 2025.

In his announcement, DeWine cited “ongoing problems involving the willingness of pharmaceutical suppliers to provide lethal injection drugs to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (DRC).” That also prompted state lawmakers in February 2024 to introduce HB 392 to add nitrogen hypoxia as a method of execution in the state. The measure was not adopted, though, forcing DeWine to delay the next three executions.

As a result, death row prisoner Percy “June” Hutton, 63, who was scheduled to die on June 18, 2025, will now wait until June 21, 2028, to face death for the 1985 murder of Derek “Ricky” Mitchell, 24, in an argument over a sewing machine. Fellow prisoner Samuel Moreland, 71, will not be killed on July 30, 2025, but on July 19, 2028, for murdering girlfriend Glenna Green, 46, in 1985, along with her daughter Lana Green, 23, and grandchildren Daytrin Talbott, 7, Datwan Talbott, 6, and Violana Green, 6. The third reprieve moved 49-year-old prisoner Douglas Lamont Coley’s execution from September 24, 2025, to August 15, 2028, for the 1997 carjacking and murder of 21-year-old Samar El-Okdi.

Louisiana Becomes Second State to Kill With Nitrogen Hypoxia

Meanwhile in federal court for the Middle District of Louisiana, condemned prisoner Jessie Hoffman, 46, filed suit on February 25, 2025, seeking to stop the state from killing him by nitrogen hypoxia for the 1997 murder of New Orleans ad woman Mary “Molly” Elliott, 28. Because the method is so new, Judge Shelly Dick ordered the state Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DPSC) to release its protocol for the procedure, which was adopted because Louisiana also has been unable to secure drugs for lethal injections.

The redacted protocol revealed that DPSC borrowed heavily from one used in Alabama, which had carried out the only U.S. nitrogen hypoxia killings. Witnesses at all four of those were treated to long gruesome minutes of desperate gasping before the prisoners died. As PLN reported, their reports were met with gaslighting when state Department of Corrections Director John Q. Hamm insisted that they saw only “involuntary body movements.” [See: PLN, Jan. 2025, p.13.]

Anxious to resume executions after a four-year hiatus, Louisiana officials agreed to reveal their protocol, promising that compared to Alabama’s it was “similar but improved”—but offering no details to back up that claim. Nevertheless, they asked to proceed with Hoffman’s killing as scheduled on March 18, 2025. But the district court refused to dismiss Hoffman’s Eighth Amendment claims on March 6, 2025. After hearing arguments the next day—from 9:00 a.m. to “sometime past 8:00 p.m.,” Judge Dick noted, producing a transcript “over 400 pages”— a temporary injunction was issued on March 11, 2025, blocking the scheduled execution. Though Judge Dick was unpersuaded by Hoffman’s arguments that nitrogen hypoxia overburdened his religious exercise of “meditative breathing,” she agreed that he would likely prevail upon his claim that it violates the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Nitrogen hypoxia, the Court noted from expert testimony, is likely to leave the prisoner suffering for 30-40 seconds before death. With Hoffman’s proposed alternative, death by firing squad, expert testimony pegged the time at 3-4 seconds. Thus, Judge Dick said, a trial was needed to weigh Hoffman’s claim that the former method impermissibly “superadds” pain. It also didn’t matter that Louisiana law doesn’t permit death by firing squad, since the method has been upheld by the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) and adopted in five other states. Judge Dick therefore could find “no legitimate, penological reason why the State has refused to adopt this method of execution.”

State officials appealed, of course, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit did not disappoint them. Vacating the temporary injunction, the Court said that the district court “didn’t just get the legal analysis wrong—it turned the Constitution on its head, by relying on an indisputably more painful method of execution as its proposed alternative,” wrote Judge James Ho, an appointee of Pres. Donald J. Trump (R).

Dissenting judge Catharina Hayes, an appointee of former Pres. George W. Bush (R), agreed with the district court that “there are issues that need more time to be resolved and decided” in Hoffman’s case, which “cannot be done once he is dead.” But SCOTUS declined to hear further appeal, and Hoffman was killed on scheduled. He was represented in his suit by attorneys with the Promise of Justice Initiative (PJI) in New Orleans and Crowell & Moring LLP. See: Hoffman v. Wescott, 2025 U.S. App. LEXIS 6083 (5th Cir.). A temporary restraining order issued by state court judge the day before was also lifted in time for the killing.

All of which leaves in limbo an earlier challenge filed by Hoffman and fellow plaintiffs to their scheduled Louisiana executions, which they lost in November 2022; they persuaded Judge Dick on February 21, 2025, to vacate that ruling and reopen the case, so that the Court may consider evidence that nitrogen hypoxia—which wasn’t a method of execution at the time of the earlier ruling—violates the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee of freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. See: Hoffman v. Jindal, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 31120 (M.D. La.). That case remains pending, though perhaps not for long. Hoffman and fellow plaintiffs are represented in their revived suit by attorneys from PJI and the Capital Appeals Project, also in New Orleans, as well as Liskow & Lewis, APLC in Houston.

Arizona Executions Resume

As PLN also reported, Arizona paused executions for two years before seeking a death warrant for prisoner Aaron Gunches, 53—a request he seconded in a handwritten January 2025 note to the state Supreme Court. [See: PLN, Feb. 2025, p.13.] With lethal injection the only legal method available in Arizona, a fatal dose of pentobarbital put Gunches to death on March 19, 2025.  

Additional sources: AP News, Ohio Capital Journal, WCMH, WGNO, WVLA/WGMB

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