Christopher Sepulvado, an 81-year-old man from Louisiana who was going to be put to death, died Saturday night, his lawyers say. This happened just days after a judge set the date for his execution.
A court issued a death warrant for Sepulvado on February 11 for the murder of his stepson, who was 6 years old, in 1992. He was to be put to death on March 17. The Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, which is in the eastern part of the state, is where he died.
In a statement reporting his death, Sepulvado’s lawyers said that he had been severely losing his mental and physical abilities over the past few years.
“The idea that the State was going to strap this tiny, frail, dying old man to a chair and make him breathe poisonous gas into his failing lungs is just barbaric,” Sepulvado’s lawyer, Shawn Nolan, said in the statement.
Lawyers for Sepulvado said he was taken to a hospital in New Orleans to have a leg amputated because it had gangrene and sepsis. On Friday, he was brought back to jail to get ready for his execution.
It was said by the Louisiana Department of Safety and Corrections that Sepulvado died “naturally due to complications arising from his pre-existing medical conditions.”
In a message to USA TODAY, Liz Murrill, the attorney general of Louisiana, said Sepulvado should have been put to death sooner.
“Justice should have been delivered long ago for the heinous act of brutally beating then scalding to death a defenseless six-year-old boy,” he said.
Louisiana was going to use a controversial way to kill people.
This would have been the first time someone was put to death in Louisiana in 15 years and the first time someone was put to death by nitrogen gas in the state.
If the new way is used, Jessie Hoffman, 46, will be the first person to die on March 18. Hoffman was found guilty of killing Mary “Molly” Elliot in 1996.
Hoffman, Sepulvado, and seven other prisoners are suing the state of Louisiana in a federal civil rights case, saying that the state’s death sentence is unconstitutional. The group’s lawyers quickly filed a motion to stop the nitrogen gas method after Republican Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry announced it would be used. They said they didn’t have enough important information about where to get the gas and how to train staff, as reported by the Louisiana Illuminator.
Landry said in a statement announcing the new way of execution that “justice will be dispensed” with it.
Landry said, “For too long, Louisiana has broken the promises it made to the victims of our state’s worst crimes.”
Some people don’t like the use of nitrogen gas in killings. The first nitrogen gas execution in the United States happened on January 25, 2024, and the Rev. Jeff Hood, a spiritual advisor for death row inmates and an activist against the death sentence, saw it and said it was “horrific.”
When nitrogen hypoxia is used, the prisoner wears a mask and sucks in pure nitrogen, which takes oxygen out of the system. Some people say it works almost instantly and doesn’t hurt. Hood and others who are against it say it hasn’t been tested enough and is the same as torturing people. Some opponents have said that using nitrogen gas goes against the Eighth Amendment, which says that people should not be punished cruelly or unusually.
Hood told USA TODAY that Landry was “cowardly” for okaying the method when it was first revealed.
So far this year, five prisoners have been put to death in the U.S., and six more are set to happen in March. The Shreveport Times, which is part of the USA TODAY Network, says that there are 57 people on death row in Louisiana.
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