Jessie Hoffman, the 46-year-old man gassed to death by Louisiana on Tuesday, was not someone who led a life of crime that ended in the murder conviction that put him on the state's Death Row 28 years ago. When he was arrested, people around him were baffled, perplexed. Because of his quiet, do-gooder character, some people close to him still believe he's innocent - though he's not, as The Lens reported in "Explaining Jessie Hoffman," a story that draws on dozens of interviews with family and friends and years of childhood records gathered and pieced together by his psych team.
Hoffman became a model prisoner, with even a prison guard vouching for him, saying that, because of "Jessie's character," he would be invited to family functions if circumstances were different and they were neighbors on the outside. Hoffman practiced Buddhism, which led to a challenge to his execution by nitrogen hypoxia -- Louisiana's first -- because Hoffman maintained that he could not continue his religious practice through breathing if nitrogen gas was streaming into a face mask.
Yet his conviction was for a gruesome crime: the kidnapping, murder and rape of a young ad-firm executive, a newlywed whom Hoffman, then 18, saw in the Central Business District in New Orleans as he left for a lunch break from his job as a valet for a local hotel. Hoffman told a psychiatrist that he remembers telling himself to stop but he couldn't make it happen.
A psychiatric team determined that Hoffman had learned to dissociate as a child, for survival. Because of that, he could mentally remove himself so that it was as though he was simply "in the room," not the victim of what was one of psychiatrists deemed "ongoing sadistic abuse." The level of abuse he had endured as a child was extreme that even longtime death-penalty attorneys had never seen anything close to it. One social worker, an early mitigation specialist on the case, said that there were 10 times more records in Hoffman's case than any other case she'd worked on, most of it covering his life up to age 10. Repeated police calls by neighbors to the household, reporting public disturbance, drunkenness, battery, domestic violence, and cruelty to juveniles. Even as a toddler, he was hospitalized for three weeks because his mother had burned his hand -- by putting it over a stove's burner until it blistered. It was a regular punishment for her children. If the hand wasn't blistered when she pulled it off, she'd put it back on the burner.
Hoffman disassociated that violence to the point where he could go to school and football practice and be a likeable, quiet child. While others in his family drank and used drugs, Hoffman avoided all of that, going to school, going to practice, going home. Even a former New Orleans Police Department assistant superintendent remembers the shock he felt hearing that Hoffman -- a football player in a police sports league -- had committed such a crime. As the execution drew closers, the top police official drove to Baton Rouge, to a rally in front of the governor's office, to plead for Hoffman's life.
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