A couple of weeks back, the #1 movie on Netflix was Trial By Fire, a 2018 flick directed by Edward Zwick and starring Laura Dern which made a case against capital punishment by telling the story of Cameron Todd Willingham, a Corsicana, Texas man who was convicted of killing his three small children by setting a fire in their bedroom.
Willingham went to his execution swearing he didn’t set that fire, and it’s an open question whether he did. Fire experts subsequently challenged the local police’s interpretation of the evidence at the house, and there were some other items in the case against Willingham which weren’t perfect, either.
On the other hand, Willingham led the kind of life which made the idea he’d kill his children wholly unremarkable to the people in that community. Which is not to excuse the state of Texas of executing an innocent man, if that’s what happened, but it was a jury of his peers which convicted him of capital murder. And while the Chicago Tribune and New York Times made a big deal about Willingham’s execution, there wasn’t a huge hue and cry in Texas about the case.
We’re not going to take a position on the Willingham case. You can be in favor of the death penalty and nevertheless see that one as a case they may have gotten wrong.
What we notice is that it’s very difficult to take the people seriously who fight every single execution on the grounds that “this one is innocent.” Especially when we know they’ll cheerfully lie about those cases. I’ve talked to anti-death penalty advocates who take the position that if a lie saves a life it’s a good thing, and from their perspective maybe they’re right.
But from a different perspective, the reflex is to simply tune them out because they’re ideologues who don’t really care about the facts of these cases; they want to stop the state from executing murderers because they don’t like it, and so gumming up the works so that even the worst of the worst get to linger at taxpayer expense without getting the retribution and justice the jury of their peers chose to impose on them is a good result.
I bring up Cameron Todd Willingham’s case and Trial By Fire, because to watch that movie you’d think he was a good guy who got railroaded by a bunch of moron cops and prosecutors. Laura Dern is the movie’s main character – she’s an emotionally frustrated liberal divorcee who becomes obsessed with Willingham’s case and turns into his prison pen pal and then turns activist with the anti-death penalty crowd in an effort to try to save him.
And there’s so much we could say about this trope. But this isn’t a review of Trial By Fire. It is, however, a review of the gaggle of lefties who protested outside the governor’s mansion on behalf of Jesse Hoffman, who unlike Cameron Todd Willingham is unquestionably guilty of the heinous murder of Molly Elliott, a young advertising account executive at Peter Mayer in New Orleans whom Hoffman kidnapped, forced at gunpoint to withdraw $200 from an ATM, forced to drive to a remote area in St. Tammany Parish, raped and then shot dead.
Then Hoffman went back to his job as a parking attendant in the garage where Molly Elliott parked for work after taking a two and a half hour “lunch break.”
Go ahead. Make that a sympathetic defendant. Good luck with that.
Hoffman was found guilty and sentenced to death back in 1998. We’ve waited 27 years for justice in that case, and all along the way the death penalty opponents have done everything they could to save him.
But tomorrow, he’s scheduled to die by nitrogen hypoxia. And now they’re throwing a fit about it.
The Louisiana Supreme Court said Sunday a man convicted of raping and killing a New Orleans advertising account executive is not entitled to a later date of execution because a preliminary injunction he won last week didn’t last long enough.
Jessie Hoffman had cited a portion of Louisiana law that says a 30- to 45-day delay is warranted if any federal or state court grants a stay of execution or a governor grants a reprieve. Hoffman is due to die by nitrogen hypoxia on Tuesday.
The justices said the provision kicks in only if the execution is actually delayed.
“When a federal or state court grants a stay of execution that is dissolved before the execution date, the execution may proceed on the date originally fixed,” the justices wrote in a 5-2 decision that was unsigned.
U.S District Judge Shelly Dick granted Hoffman a preliminary injunction last week so he could raise claims that asphyxiation by nitrogen gas could be a cruel or unusual punishment. Federal courts in Alabama, and the U.S. Supreme Court, have allowed gassing prisoners.
Also last week, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Dick’s order and said she had overstepped her bounds.
The state Supreme Court said Sunday that when a stay is almost immediately reversed, the execution on the original date.
This is how ridiculous things have gotten…
WBRZ previously reported that Hoffman requested to die either by firing squad or by drinking a deadly drug cocktail, which is similar to a combination used in assisted suicides and not permitted in Louisiana.
Lethal injections that are allowed in the state have been blocked by pharmaceutical companies and Louisiana no longer has a working electric chair.
Hoffman, who is a Buddhist, claims that death by nitrogen hypoxia will not allow him to practice his religion’s meditative breathing during his last moments of life.
Did Molly Elliott get to practice meditative breathing as she died, naked and violated, at Jesse Hoffman’s hands?
Of course he requested methods of execution Louisiana doesn’t have anymore, because his left-wing advocacy lawyers were doing everything they could to game the system. Because if it saves a life, right?
Judges like Shelly Dick have hamstrung the state in every possible way when it came to methods of execution. Now we’re going to be told that nitrogen hypoxia is cruel and unusual – as was the chair, as was lethal injection, as was hanging, as was every other means of capital punishment.
And now we’re getting the pet “conservative” columnists at the Baton Rouge Advocate jumping into Hoffman’s corner, alleging he’s a changed man and shouldn’t be executed.
I can make a COMPELLING legal argument against this execution (now back on track due to bad 5th Circuit ruling). https://t.co/gyOXeVfgXW I BEG the Supreme to reinstate the injunction against it. @EdWhelanEPPC
— Quin Hillyer (@QuinHillyer) March 17, 2025
That sure doesn’t do Molly Elliott much good, does it?
You might not agree with the death penalty, and that’s fine. The fact is, it’s the law of the land. The Louisiana legislature has created it as an option for juries to dispose of the worst murder cases in our state, and those people on death row are there because juries agreed they ought to be there. We ask them to sit in judgment of cases which are so awful that they very often scar the people forced to sit through evidence of the most terrible deeds humans can do, and when they deliberate and bring a guilty verdict with a death sentence in response, we’re going to tell them their efforts are to be disregarded?
Because of ideological fetishes?
Quin Hillyer doesn’t care about Jesse Hoffman. If Hoffman is a changed man, that’s good. If he dies a redeemed man and goes on to his great reward, then so be it. That isn’t really the state of Louisiana’s problem. What Hoffman did was so awful a jury rendered the most drastic sanction available to them in order to punish it. Hillyer is taking up Hoffman’s cause because he wants to present as a “thoughtful” and “reasonable” pundit to the leftists who run the Advocate, and waxing indignant about carrying out a long-delayed death sentence for one of the most abominable murderers in Louisiana’s history is a quite flamboyant way to do that.
Enough of this. The sentence is just, the method of execution is among the cleanest possible and the law is clear.
Jesse Hoffman is not Cameron Todd Willingham. He’s not a proper cause celebre. If you want to stop the death penalty, then elect people who’ll change the law.
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