Jessie Hoffman Jr.


Jessie Dean Hoffman Jr. was an American convicted murderer who was sentenced to death in Louisiana for the 1996 rape and murder of Molly Elliott. On November 26, 1996, Hoffman, then 18, abducted the 28-year-old advertising executive in downtown New Orleans. After forcing her to withdraw money from an ATM at gunpoint, he made her drive to a remote area in St. Tammany Parish, where he raped and murdered her.
Hoffman was found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to death on September 11, 1998. He was executed by nitrogen hypoxia on March 18, 2025, marking Louisiana's first execution in over fifteen years and its first use of nitrogen gas. This followed Alabama's use of the method in the executions of four inmates, starting with Kenneth Eugene Smith in January 2024 and ending with Demetrius Terrence Frazier in February 2025.
Hoffman's execution became a subject of controversy as his lawyers argued that nitrogen hypoxia, an untested method in Louisiana, violated the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" and infringed on his religious rights. They also pointed to eyewitness accounts of the previous four nitrogen gas executions from Alabama, where inmates gasped and thrashed, challenging claims of a quick death. Although a federal district judge stayed the execution, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned it, and the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately denied Hoffman's final appeal by a 5–4 majority ruling, leading to Hoffman's execution.

Personal life

Jessie Dean Hoffman Jr. was born in Louisiana on September 1, 1978. Hoffman grew up in a family of five children; one of Hoffman's brothers, Charles Fields, was shot and killed at the age of 25 in New Orleans on May 31, 1998. Hoffman was unmarried, but he had a girlfriend who gave birth to their son sometime after Hoffman was arrested for a 1996 murder case.
According to one of Hoffman's brothers, Marvin Fields, the family was not well-off and at one point, they moved to Florida and settled into a housing development area. At a young age, Hoffman and his siblings were often abused by their mother, who would regularly beat them with strip cuts of a thick belt and also placed their hands on a hot stove until their fingers grew blisters as a punishment for stealing. Despite his troubles at home, Hoffman did well in school as a football player who played quarterback for the school team, and even attained straight A's through the 11th grade, but his grades fell after he began a relationship with his then-girlfriend.
By 1996, Hoffman completed his high school education at Kennedy High School and graduated. He also worked in multiple jobs during high school, including a restaurant worker and inn employee. After his high school graduation, Hoffman went on to work as a carpark valet in New Orleans in November 1996, but less than three weeks after he began his valet job, Hoffman committed the rape and murder that landed him on death row.

Murder of Molly Elliott

On November 26, 1996, Jessie Hoffman Jr., who was two months past his 18th birthday, kidnapped, raped, and murdered a woman in Louisiana.
On that day, 28-year-old advertising executive Mary "Molly" Elliott had just left work and was on her way to retrieve her car at the Sheraton parking garage in downtown New Orleans, where she regularly parked her car for work. Elliott encountered Hoffman in the garage; he was working as a valet at the garage and kidnapped the woman at gunpoint in her own car.
Hoffman forced Elliott to drive to a nearby ATM and withdraw some money. After receiving $200, Hoffman asked Elliott to drive them to a remote area in St. Tammany Parish. After arriving there, Hoffman raped Elliott at gunpoint and made her march to a dirt patch. At the patch itself, Elliott was forced to kneel on a makeshift dock near the Middle Pearl River and Hoffman shot her in the head in an execution-style manner. After killing Elliott, Hoffman left her naked body behind and disposed of her belongings and the murder weapon.
Elliott's body was not found until two days later, on November 28, 1996, Thanksgiving Day. A duck hunter discovered Elliott's corpse and reported the finding to the police. Elliott's husband, who reported his wife missing after she failed to meet him for dinner, identified her later that day. The police also received a report from a couple who found Elliott's clothes and belongings at a vacant lot. Among the objects were three ATM receipts, which were traced back to the same ATM where Elliott withdrew money for Hoffman. The police managed to identify and arrest Hoffman, based on the description of an African-American gunman captured together with Elliott on the photographs taken from the ATM. Hoffman initially denied his involvement in the murder, but he later admitted to the crime.
Background information revealed that Elliott, whose full name was Mary Margaret Murphy Elliott, was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, before she completed her college education in southern California and moved to Los Angeles to work in an advertising company. Elliott met her husband Andy Elliott and they moved to the north of New Orleans and settled in Covington, Louisiana, in 1994, and they married in the spring of 1995, just less than two years before her death.

Murder trial of Hoffman

After his arrest, Jessie Hoffman Jr. was charged with first-degree murder. On January 8, 1997, a St. Tammany Parish grand jury indicted Hoffman for the first-degree murder charge. Under Louisiana state law, an offense of first-degree murder carries the death penalty if found guilty.
Subsequently, Hoffman stood trial before a 12-member St. Tammany Parish jury in 1998. It was adduced in trial that Hoffman had used the money he took from Elliott to go shopping with his girlfriend. Based on Hoffman's first statement, he said that after he kidnapped Elliott and had sex with her, which Hoffman claimed to be consensual and not rape, an unknown man armed with a gun walked off with Elliott into the secluded spot at St. Tammany Parish, before he returned alone. He recanted the statement in a later interrogation session, and said that the gun went off accidentally during a struggle with Elliott over the gun, and Elliott died from the shooting as a result.
On June 25, 1998, the jury found Hoffman guilty of first-degree murder as charged. In their plea for mitigation, Hoffman's lawyers contended that Hoffman suffered from chronic childhood abuse and neglect, leading to post-traumatic stress symptoms and brain damage.
On June 27, 1998, two days after his conviction, the same jury returned with their verdict on sentence, recommending the death penalty for Hoffman.
On September 11, 1998, Hoffman was formally sentenced to death by the trial court, in accordance to the jury's recommendation. Two months later, Hoffman was officially transferred to death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary on November 11, 1998.

Appeals and subsequent developments

Regular appeals

On April 11, 2000, the Louisiana Supreme Court dismissed Jessie Hoffman's appeal. On October 16, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Hoffman's appeal. On March 30, 2012, a federal judge turned down Hoffman's federal habeas petition without a hearing. On May 12, 2014, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Hoffman's appeal. On January 20, 2015, Hoffman's final appeal and petition for a writ of certiorari was denied by the U.S. Supreme Court, which thereby confirmed his death sentence.
On October 19, 2021, the Louisiana Supreme Court rejected another appeal from Hoffman. In the appeal, Hoffman alleged in his grounds of appeal that the validity of his conviction was breached by racial discrimination given that the jury that convicted him consisted of all 12 White jurors, and that his age of 18 made it manifestly excessive for him to receive a death sentence. The court rejected his claims of racial bias and also found that there was no tangible evidence of any consensus of against executing people under the age of 21, and dismissed his other points of appeal as well.

Lawsuit against execution protocols

On December 22, 2012, Hoffman filed a lawsuit against the state's lethal injection protocols, on the basis that its protocols were constituted as "cruel and unusual punishment" and that the state breached his constitutional rights. While the lawsuit was ongoing, the state suspended the execution warrant of another death row inmate Christopher Sepulvado, who was originally scheduled to be executed on February 13, 2013; Sepulvado was allowed to join as a co-plaintiff in Hoffman's lawsuit thereafter.
Subsequently, a second lawsuit was filed by both Hoffman and Sepulvado against the state's lethal injection protocols in 2014, after the Louisiana prison authorities decided to switch to a new double-drug combination in a second attempt to carry out Sepulvado's execution, which was re-scheduled to happen in February 2014. The execution was delayed while the lawsuit was pending in the courts, with the plaintiffs arguing that such a combination could give rise to the possibility of cruel and unusual punishment and violating their constitutional rights. At that time, Louisiana and several other states made amendments to their lethal injection protocols due to the European drugmakers' decision to stop exporting their barbiturates and sedatives to the U.S for lethal injection executions in the death penalty states, which in turn led to the shortage of lethal injection drugs in these states.
On April 3, 2022, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick dismissed the lawsuit challenging Louisiana's lethal injection protocols, nearly a decade after it was first filed. The court ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the protocols due to the state's inability to secure the necessary drugs for lethal injections. Among the plaintiffs was Hoffman, one of the ten or so condemned inmates involved in the case.