Jeff Landry, the Louisiana attorney general who was just elected governor, has long worked to make sure prisoners on death row are executed.

This guy has a real hard on for executions.

Earlier this year, the dozens of inmates on Louisiana’s death row had a glimmer of hope: In April, Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, used his last state of the state address to call on the legislature to abolish executions. He declared them exorbitantly expensive, difficult to administer, and often wrong, pointing to more than 50 reversals of sentences and six full exonerations of death row inmates in the last 20 years… But, in Louisiana, the governor does not have sole authority to commute death sentences; granting clemency requires the approval of the Louisiana Board of Pardons and Committee on Parole. In July, the board, acting on advice from Attorney General [and now Governor-Elect] Landry, denied all 56 petitions outright and en masse.

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    -2•1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    For 56 of the state’s residents, the stakes of that contest were especially high: The elevation of Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, a rabid defender of the death penalty, dramatically increases the odds they will soon be executed.

    He declared them exorbitantly expensive, difficult to administer, and often wrong, pointing to more than 50 reversals of sentences and six full exonerations of death row inmates in the last 20 years.

    In July, the board, acting on advice from Attorney General Landry, denied all 56 petitions outright and en masse.

    “In filing these petitions and looking into these cases, it became clear to us that out of the 57 people on death row, each one of these guys and and one woman have extremely strong claims, ranging from intellectual disability, serious mental illness, childhood trauma, innocence, racism — every single one of them,” Trenticosta Kappel says.

    “And the fact that the DAs and the AG fought so hard to prevent these cases from being heard just shows that they are afraid of the broken nature of the death penalty in Louisiana being exposed in front of the national audience.”

    Five years ago, Landry sent a letter to the governor urging him to explore other options after a critical component of the drug cocktail used in lethal injections became unavailable.

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