A terminally ill man who spent over 30 years on death row in Louisiana for the killing of his stepson died days after a March date was scheduled for his execution by nitrogen gas, according to The Associated Press.
Christopher Sepulvado, 81, died Saturday at the Louisiana
State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana, “from natural causes as a result of
complications arising from his pre-existing medical conditions,” according to
the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections.
Sepulvado was charged with the 1992 killing of his
6-year-old stepson after the boy came home from school with soiled underwear.
Sepulvado was accused of hitting him on the head with a screwdriver and
immersing him in scalding water. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to
death in 1993.
His attorney, federal public defender Shawn Nolan, said in a
statement Sunday that doctors recently determined Sepulvado was terminally ill
and recommended hospice care. Nolan described his client’s “significant”
physical and cognitive decline in recent years.
“Christopher Sepulvado’s death overnight in the prison
infirmary is a sad comment on the state of the death penalty in Louisiana,”
Nolan 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.”
According to Nolan, Sepulvado had been sent to New Orleans
for surgery earlier in the week but was returned to the prison Friday night.
Louisiana officials decided to resume carrying out death
sentences earlier this month after a 15 year pause driven by a lack of
political interest and the inability to secure legal injection drugs.
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry pushed to proceed with a new nitrogen gas execution
protocol after the state’s GOP-dominated Legislature last year expanded
death row execution methods to include electrocution and nitrogen gas.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a statement
that “justice should have been delivered long ago” and Louisiana “failed to
deliver it in his lifetime.”
Sepulvado’s execution was scheduled for March 17. Another
man, Jessie Hoffman, was convicted of first-degree murder in 1996 and slated
for execution on March 18. Hoffman initially challenged Louisiana’s lethal
injection protocol in 2012 on the grounds that the method was cruel and unusual
punishment. A federal judge on Friday reopened
that lawsuit after it was dismissed in 2022 because the state had no
executions planned.
The country’s first
execution using nitrogen gas was carried out last year in Alabama,
which has now executed four people using
the method.
To read more CLICK HERE
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment