BATON ROUGE — A federal judge resurrected a challenge to Louisiana's death penalty procedures Friday as the state prepares to reopen its execution chamber.

Two inmates are scheduled to die next month, likely by nitrogen hypoxia.

A 2012 lawsuit challenging Louisiana's execution methods was dismissed as moot in 2022, as the state couldn't obtain the drugs needed for a lethal injection. However, with the state announcing a protocol for nitrogen hypoxia this month, U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick said she would let challenges resume.

"This case has always been about Louisiana's execution protocol," Dick wrote Friday. "It is still about Louisiana's election protocol. And now that the protocol appears viable, there is an actionable case and controversy."

Christopher Sepulvado is scheduled to die March 17 and Jessie Hoffman is set for execution the next day. 

Sepulvado, now 81, was convicted of killing his stepson, Wesley Allen Mercer, 6, in 1992, the weekend after marrying the boy's mother. Prosecutors said the child was beaten and scalded two days after defecating in his pants at school.

Hoffman, 46, was convicted in the rape and killing of Mary "Molly" Elliott in St. Tammany Parish. The advertising firm account executive had been abducted in downtown New Orleans in 1996, robbed and then raped and shot execution-style near the Middle Pearl River.

The governor and attorney general say that, with the nitrogen hypoxia protocol in place, the state has an obligation to the victims' families to carry out executions.

Louisiana's death row inmates previously questioned the state's lethal injection procedures, saying there were no assurances that their executions would not be cruel or unusual in violation of the state and U.S. constitutions. With the state unable to obtain the drugs needed — pharmaceutical companies stopped supplying states with drugs for use in executions — the challenge was considered moot.

Rather than make the inmates and the state work through a new lawsuit, Dick on Friday set aside her previous ruling and said it was most-efficient to use the existing lawsuit.

"In light of Louisiana’s state law now providing new methods of execution, a new protocol addressing death by nitrogen hypoxia, and the state court’s definitive actions of issuing death warrants, the court finds that plaintiffs have established extraordinary circumstances" required to jump-start the old lawsuit, Dick said.

Louisiana's most recent execution was in 2010, when Gerald Bordelon was killed for the 2002 rape and murder of his 12-year-old stepdaughter.