Warning: This article contains discussion of child abuse which some readers may find distressing.
A man who spent more than 30 years on death row has died just weeks before his execution was due to take place.
Christopher Sepulvado from Louisiana was convicted for the murder of his six-year-old stepson in 1993 and had spent the last three decades awaiting execution.
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Sepulvado was due to be killed by nitrogen gas on March 17, however, the 81-year-old died of 'natural causes' just a matter of weeks before the execution could take place.
He died on Saturday at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola from 'natural causes as a result of complications arising from his pre-existing medical conditions', according to the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, reports The Mirror.
The death row inmate was convicted in 1992 of killing Wesley Allen Mercer when the schoolboy came home with soiled underwear.
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Sepulvado was accused of beating the boy to death with a screwdriver and scalding him with boiling hot water in 1992.
An autopsy on the child's lifeless body revealed he had suffered heart and lung failure caused by third degree burns covering more than half of his body.
Prior to the murder, Sepulvado reportedly abused the young boy, who he had whipped with a belt and had his head shoved into a toilet bowl.
Sepulvado was convicted of the child's murder and sentenced to death in 1993.
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News of the inmate's death comes as his attorneys argued his physical and cognitive state had declined over the years.
Shawn Nolan, Sepulvado's attorney, said: "The idea that the State was planning to strap this tiny, frail, dying old man to a chair and force him to breathe toxic gas into his failing lungs is simply barbaric."
His legal team also said Sepulvado had been sent to a hospital in New Orleans to have a leg amputated that had become gangrene and infected with sepsis before he was returned to jail in prep for the execution.
Sepulvado would have been the first person to be executed in the state after a 15 year pause, and the first ever to have been killed by nitrogen gas.
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Officials gave the green light to carrying out death sentences after the lengthy hiatus, which was reportedly driven by a lack of political interest and difficulty in securing lethal injection drugs.
Republican Gov. Jeff Landry pushed to proceed with the nitrogen hypoxia after legislation in Louisiana expanded legal methods to include electrocution and nitrogen gas last year.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill told USA Today that Sepulvado should have been executed sooner.
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"Justice should have been delivered long ago for the heinous act of brutally beating then scalding to death a defenseless six-year-old boy," Murrill said.
Nitrogen gas has been used already in Alabama as an execution method, so far killing four people in the state.
The next death row inmate scheduled to die in Louisiana is Jessie Hoffman.
Hoffman is sentenced to death on March 18 after being convicted of first-degree murder in 1996.
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He has joined several other inmates in a federal civil rights lawsuit to challenge the state's death penalty.
Meanwhile, other critics and anti-death penalty activists have slammed nitrogen hypoxia, with Rev Jeff Hood describing the first nitrogen gas execution of Kenny Eugene Smith in Alabama on January 25, 2024, as 'horrific.'
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