BATON ROUGE — A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the scheduled execution of a death row inmate who was set to die by nitrogen hypoxia at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola next week.

After conducting a daylong hearing in U.S. District Court in Baton Rouge last Friday, Judge Shelly Dick on Tuesday granted Jessie Hoffman's request for an injunction and said a trial should be held on his claims that death-by-asphyxiation could be a cruel or unusual punishment barred under the U.S. Constitution.

Lawyers for the state said immediately that they would appeal to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

Hoffman was scheduled to die March 18 for the 1996 rape and murder of Mary "Missy" Elliot, a 28-year-old advertising account executive from New Orleans. Her nude body was found near the Pearl River in St. Tammany Parish; she had been shot in the head execution-style.

The judge gave assurances that Hoffman will be eventually be executed, but said Louisiana shouldn't be in so much of a hurry that it would deny him a day in court. She said she wanted to make sure the execution wouldn't violate the Eighth Amendment, and that killing him next week would be wrong.

"Perhaps the single most important prerequisite for the issuance of a preliminary injunction is a demonstration that if it is not granted the applicant is likely to suffer irreparable harm," Dick wrote. "No harm is more irreparable than death." 

Cecelia Kappel, one of Hoffman's lawyers, said she and her associates were grateful for Dick's decision. "This order gives everyone a chance to have a full trial on the merits before Jessie is executed" by a means that "risks inflicting torture."

In addition to his fears of a cruel death, Hoffman had claimed that, as a Buddhist who practices meditative breathing, requiring him to take in nitrogen instead of normal air as he died would violate his religious rights. Dick said it wouldn't.

"There is no substantial burden to his exercise of rhythmic breathing," she wrote, saying witnesses offered no proof that a Buddhist religious rite would be violated.

Alabama has killed four inmates by nitrogen hypoxia. Dick paid particular attention to a witness who was both an inmate's spiritual adviser and a medical doctor.

"We don't see people jerking around like that while they're dying normally," the doctor/spiritual adviser said after one of the Alabama deaths. "His face was twisted, and he looked like he was suffering."

Two expert doctors who testified at the Baton Rouge hearing — one for each side — agreed that nitrogen hypoxia wouldn't cause physical pain. One doctor said it would cause "emotional terror" and the other said the oxygen deprivation would trigger an instinctual response.

"He also agreed that if your brain is telling you to breathe and your mind knows breathing will kill you, this creates 'severe emotional suffering," Dick wrote. "... the inability to quiet the primal urge to breathe is severe emotional suffering."

While the state said inmates would be unconscious within 40 seconds, it was likely that the condemned would struggle and be conscious for 3-5 minutes. Citing an Alabama federal court, she said that the longer an inmate remains conscious while breathing in nitrogen, "the more likely it becomes that the Eighth Amendment may be violated."

The judge said Hoffman sufficiently demonstrated that Louisiana's use of a firing squad would leave him unconscious within three to four seconds and that the state, if it chose, could adopt that method. It said he had not proven that giving him a mix of sedatives and drugs that would stop his heart was feasible. The method is used in assisted suicide.

Dick said that since many pharmaceutical companies will not let states use their products in executions, Hoffman shouldn't expect that Louisiana could kill him that way.

The judge did not rule specifically on Hoffman's claim that nitrogen hypoxia constituted a cruel or unusual punishment, but did say there was a "substantial likelihood" that he could make a successful argument at a trial. 

"(Hoffman) has shown that nitrogen hypoxia superadds psychological pain, suffering, and terror to his execution when compared to execution by firing squad," she wrote. "He has shown that execution by firing squad is a feasible and readily available alternative that the state has no legitimate penological reason for not adopting."

Perhaps anticipating the state's appeal, Dick said that with the record "undeveloped" she had no choice but to delay Hoffman's death.

"Hoffman is going to be executed. It's not a question of if; it's merely a question of how, and the alternatives are quickly narrowing," she wrote. 

The state no longer has a working electric chair and cannot find the drugs for a lethal injection; the only options are nitrogen hypoxia and a firing squad, and Dick wouldn't be rushed into a decision.

"The state's desire for swiftness does not prevail over well-informed deliberation," she wrote.