Posted on 03/18/2025 11:05:26 PM PDT by RandFan
The Supreme Court in a 5-4 vote declined to stop Louisiana from carrying out its first execution in 15 years later Tuesday with Justice Neil Gorsuch joining the court’s three liberal justices in agreeing to delay it.
Jessie Hoffman, 46, is set to be executed for the 1996 kidnapping, rape and murder of Molly Elliott, making Louisiana the second state to carry out an execution by nitrogen gas. The Supreme Court has also declined to step in since Alabama began employing the method last year.
Five of the court’s conservatives — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — refused Hoffman’s final appeal to delay his execution without comment.
The three liberal justices dissented in that decision, joined by Gorsuch, President Trump’s first appointee to the court.
Though the liberal justices did not explain their reasoning, Gorsuch in a written dissent said he would’ve sent the case back to a lower court for another look at Hoffman’s claims that Louisiana’s nitrogen hypoxia method substantially burdens his right to practice his Buddhist faith under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) of 2000.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
The Supreme Court in a 5-4 vote declined to stop Louisiana from carrying out its first execution in 15 years later Tuesday with Justice Neil Gorsuch joining the court’s three liberal justices in agreeing to delay it.
GORSUCH?!!
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a two-paragraph dissent from the decision to allow Hoffman’s execution to go forward. Gorsuch observed that the district court had rejected Hoffman’s religious freedom claim “based on its own ‘find[ing]’ about the kind of breathing Mr. Hoffman’s faith requires.” But that conclusion, Gorsuch emphasized, “contravened the fundamental principle” that courts should not weigh in on whether someone’s religious beliefs are sincere.
Moreover, Gorsuch continued, the 5th Circuit did not address this “apparent legal error” or even Hoffman’s religious freedom claim itself. The failure to do so, Gorsuch reasoned, leaves the Supreme Court “poorly position to address it.” He would therefore have granted both Hoffman’s request for a stay and his petition for review, thrown out the 5th Circuit’s decision, and sent the case back to the court of appeals for it to consider the religious freedom claim.
I keep telling people that Gorsuck is very squishy. But seriously, what did the Buddha have against nitrogen? What a hunk of B.S.
Well, I was wondering what sort of business was more pressing on the S.C. right now than dealing with the potential constitutional crisis being created by the lower courts, but I guess this explains it.
Was he a Buddhist 29 years ago when he did this horrific crime at the age of 17?
Instead of nitrogen, does he prefer the Buddhist way? Doused in gasoline and set on fire?
I’ll bring the matches.
Prayers for the loved ones of Molly who never got to see her grow up.
Oopsie.
He died a couple hours ago.
https://www.wdsu.com/article/louisiana-nitrogen-gas-jesse-hoffman-tuesday-1742345848/64225052
Molly was a married 28 year old advertising professional when she was stolen,raped,tortured,and murdered by 18 year old Hoffman in New Orleans.
What an absurd argument from Gorsuch. Hoffman’s right to life has already been forfeited by a court of law, and Gorsuch is concerned about protecting his religious rights?
He just found out who Jesus is.
What Gorsuch is getting at is that the method of execution may have violated his religious beliefs.
Understood. But you lose certain rights when you’ve been convicted of a crime. The idea that a convicted murder’s religious beliefs are more sacrosanct than his right to life and are so inviolable that they can be allowed to shield him from execution, is absurd. All the more so because, Gorsuch asserts a “fundamental principle” that courts should not weigh in on whether someone’s religious beliefs are sincere. In other words, any such assertion has to be assumed to be sincere.
Such a “fundamental principle” essentially empowers anyone facing a death sentence to assert that any method of execution violates his religious beliefs, and that any such assertion must be assumed to be sincere.
What if being executed violated his religious beliefs? There is no limiting principle as to what is a valid religion, case in point: Satanism and Islam. But I repeat myself.
F him all bets are off you dead
The convict’s challenge is completely frivolous and self-serving.
I am going to weigh in with Gorsuch here. We have reduced ourselves to a Supreme Court who base their decisions on legal wrangling and trying to undo the silly arguments on the other side with silly arguments of your own. Gorsuch is raising a much higher issue, as he usually does. Do we just value life or do we value the life enlightened by higher truths. If the later, than when we deliberately take a life, because it is just we should do it in a way that recognizes that enlightenment that higher ideal about what a human life is. To treat a life as just the property of a brutal state reducces us to the wild beasts or even worse. It’s not about what kind of a monster the perp is [the left doesn’t care, actually] but what kind of a monster we are, and our globalist godless society using whatever unscientific excuse we can conjure up for some more opportunities to grift off of magic money and NGOs is a pretty ugly monster. When you take your last breath of life would you like to see the face of Gates or Fauci or Pelosi. That is the society we have become.
“Gorsuch in a written dissent said he would’ve sent the case back to a lower court for another look at Hoffman’s claims that Louisiana’s nitrogen hypoxia method substantially burdens his right to practice his Buddhist faith under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) of 2000.”
According to the murderer’s lawyers, the execution “...infringes on Hoffman’s freedom to practice religion, specifically his Buddhist breathing and meditation in the moments leading up to his death” and most of us thought that was a joke.
Talk about utter, mind-bending insanity, that is the ultimate. Gorsuch should never be allowed to live that down. Every inmate on death row in the nation would immediately become a Buddhist.
This finally proves Roberts and Amy are not liberals.
And yet, how often are we told that Roberts and Coney Barrett are liberal and useless judges. That is a common meme here on Free Republic.
Generally Thomas and Alito are considered the only reliable conservative judges. All of the others have gone liberal on us,,at one time or another .
WINNING! One less fiend in the world. AND this fiend has been 100% DETERRED from ever committing another crime.
Capital Punishment is 100% effective in deterring crime.
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