ANGOLA, La. >> The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-ditch effort to block Louisiana’s first execution using nitrogen gas, declining to intervene by a 5-4 vote shortly before a man was to be put to death Tuesday evening for a woman’s killing decades ago.

Louisiana planned to use the new method to carry out the state’s first execution in 15 years on Jessie Hoffman Jr., 46. Hoffman was convicted of killing a 28-year-old advertising executive, Mary “Molly” Elliott, in New Orleans, a crime committed when he was 18.

Nitrogen gas has been used just four times to execute a person in the U.S. — all in Alabama. Three other executions, by lethal injection, are scheduled this week — in Arizona on Wednesday and in Florida and Oklahoma on Thursday.

Hoffman’s lawyers had argued that the nitrogen gas method violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. They also said it infringed on Hoffman’s freedom to practice religion, specifically his Buddhist breathing and meditation in the moments leading up to death.

However, Louisiana officials maintained the method, which deprives a person of oxygen, is painless. They also said it was past time for the state to deliver justice as promised to victims’ families after a decade and a half hiatus — one brought on partly by an inability to secure lethal injection drugs.