A Baton Rouge man convicted of double murder saw his path get narrower this week when a federal judge denied a request to reconsider his sentence and the governor said he would not consider giving him clemency.
Todd Wessinger was convicted of killing two of his former restaurant coworkers in Baton Rouge in 1995.
On Monday, Wessinger’s attorneys filed a request with the state Board of Pardons to recommend that the governor amend his sentence to life without parole and take him off death row.
But Gov. Jeff Landry said Tuesday that a life sentence would not be an option.
“There will be no clemency for Todd Wessinger,” Landry wrote Tuesday afternoon on X. “We stand firmly with the victims and their families.”
Also on Tuesday, Judge John deGravelles of the U.S. Middle District of Louisiana denied Wessinger’s plea to , rejecting an argument that Wessinger did not receive effective counsel in his original trial. He did so after the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a previous ruling in Wessinger’s favor, saying that new evidence could not be considered in the case.
Wessinger’s attorneys recently requested a new penalty phase for his case in state court.
His attorneys say a 2014 brain scan, conducted nearly two decades after a jury gave him a death sentence, shows he had a stroke as a child that affected the part of his brain that impacts decision-making and impulse control.
Christie Gibbens, a federal public defender on Wessinger’s case, said his legal team will keep seeking legal remedies,
“Two federal judges have found that Todd Wessinger’s death sentence is unconstitutional because his jury never heard evidence of his brain damage and the abuse he suffered as a child, evidence that carried a reasonable probability of a life sentence,” Gibbens said in a statement. “No state court has ever afforded Mr. Wessinger a full and fair hearing on that claim, and his successor petition seeking that hearing remains pending.”
Gibbens said Landry’s statement “does not take into account the person Mr. Wessinger has become over nearly three decades on death row, as documented in his clemency application.”
Wessinger and his attorney are not arguing about whether he actually shot and killed Stephanie Guzzardo and David Breakwell, two of his former co-workers at a Calendar’s Restaurant that was located on Perkins Road in Baton Rouge. Instead, their claims argue that the jury imposed a death sentence without all of the relevant facts.
Separately, he also asked the federal court in September to stop the execution, arguing that the state’s method of execution using nitrogen hypoxia or midazolam and hydromorphone was cruel and unusual.
Last week, after a U.S. appeals court denied Wessinger’s request for a rehearing, Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore said he planned to apply for a death warrant. That legal order would set the date, time and location for the state to execute Wessinger.