Louisiana Plans to Resume Capital Punishment With First Nitrogen Execution

“It is wholly inconsistent with Louisiana’s pro-life values, as it quite literally promotes a culture of death,” Mr. Edwards said in 2023, boosting the hopes of activists who wanted to end the death penalty in the state and prompting clemency requests from nearly every prisoner on death row.

Mr. Landry, then the state’s attorney general, argued that many of those prisoners were not eligible for clemency. More recently, he said the state needed to follow through on their sentences. The state currently has 56 people on death row.

“These capital punishment cases have been reviewed at every judicial level, have had decades of unsuccessful appeals, and the death sentences affirmed by the courts,” Mr. Landry said last month, adding that it was vital to “move swiftly to bring justice to the crime victims who have waited for too long.”

Another execution in Louisiana using nitrogen gas had been scheduled for Monday, but the condemned inmate, Christopher Sepulvado, died on Feb. 23, apparently of natural causes. Mr. Sepulvado, 81, was terminally ill and his doctors had recommended hospice care, his lawyers said.

“The idea that the state was planning to strap this tiny, frail, dying old man to a chair and force him to breathe toxic gas into his failing lungs is simply barbaric,” Shawn Nolan, one of Mr. Sepulvado’s lawyers, said in a statement after his death.

Before now, the most recent execution in Louisiana took place on Jan. 7, 2010. Gerald Bordelon, 47, who was convicted of strangling his 12-year-old stepdaughter to death, was killed by lethal injection.

Adam Liptak contributed reporting.