Louisiana Act 651 Lets Judges Add Surgical Castration to Sentences for Sex Crimes Against Young Children
Louisiana is still the only U.S. state that lets a judge add surgical castration to a prison term for certain aggravated sex offenses when the victim was under 13. Lawmakers gave the bill final approval on June 3, 2024. Gov. Jeff Landry signed it. The measure took effect August 1, 2024, as Act 651. The procedure is irreversible. It sits on top of incarceration; it does not replace a sentence. It does not apply to defendants under 17. Two years later the statute is no longer a press-release experiment. It is in plea transcripts.
Democratic state Sen. Regina Barrow of Baton Rouge sponsored the bill and framed it as a deterrent aimed at crimes against children who cannot protect themselves. Judges, she said, would take cases one at a time. The text is written as gender-neutral. It covers aggravated sex offenses — including rape, incest, and molestation — committed on or after August 1, 2024, against a child under 13. The enrolled act is posted with the Louisiana State Legislature.
What the statute actually orders a doctor to do
Louisiana has allowed chemical castration, medication that lowers testosterone, since 2008. Officials have recalled only one or two uses of that older law between 2010 and 2019. Surgical castration — removal of the testes or ovaries — is a different category. Few governments on earth authorize it as a criminal penalty. Cited examples include the Czech Republic, Madagascar, and Nigeria’s Kaduna State. Louisiana chose to join that short list.
Act 651 requires a court-appointed medical expert, within 60 days of sentencing, to decide whether the offender is “an appropriate candidate for surgery.” The procedure cannot be ordered if it is not medically appropriate. The Department of Public Safety and Corrections is responsible for carrying it out through a licensed physician. Corrections officials have described contracting a board-certified urologist at an offsite hospital and timing the operation near release, not on intake day. An offender who refuses or fails to appear faces a separate “failure to comply” count that carries three to five extra years without parole, probation, or suspension of sentence.
That last clause is the hinge. Supporters call it an option with a penalty for defiance. Defense lawyers call it a coerced surgery: take the knife or take years you cannot get back. The American Medical Association’s ethics code tells physicians to avoid court-ordered procedures meant as punishment. That raises a practical problem the legislature did not solve on the floor. If the doctors who are allowed to operate will not operate, the Department of Corrections is holding a sentence it cannot execute. Legal journals in 2025 mapped the Eighth Amendment fight they expect — cruel-and-unusual claims, bodily-integrity claims, and the risk that a wrongful conviction in a sex case cannot be walked back after the tissue is gone.
Plea deals put names on a law that had only a bill number
In August 2025, Thomas Allen McCartney, 37, pleaded guilty in Vernon Parish to attempted first-degree rape of a 7-year-old girl. As part of the deal he agreed to chemical and surgical castration and a 40-year prison term. Local stations treated that plea as the first widely reported use of Act 651 in a courtroom. There was still no public record that the surgery had been performed. Agreement on paper and a completed operation are not the same event, especially when the statute itself points toward a date near release.
On April 6, 2026, Zachary Dewayne Doolittle, 40, of Bossier City, pleaded guilty in Bossier Parish to aggravated crimes against nature involving a family member under 13. He was sentenced to 45 years at hard labor and, under La. R.S. 14:43.6, to castration. District Attorney Schuyler Marvin said his office would keep using the tool against people who victimize children. Some prosecutors have noted, off the podium, that a defendant may accept a procedure scheduled years or decades later in exchange for a term that is shorter than a trial risk. That is how a first-in-the-nation penalty becomes a bargaining chip instead of an immediate medical event.
Act 651 arrived in a stack of hard-line measures Landry signed after taking office in January 2024, alongside expanded execution methods and tighter parole rules for new convictions. Before the act even took effect, a Livingston Parish judge in April 2024 had already ordered physical castration of Glenn Sullivan Sr. in a separate rape case involving a 14-year-old. The AEGIS Alliance covered that sentence in Louisiana man Glenn Sullivan Sr. gets 50 years and physical castration. Sullivan’s victim was older than the under-13 cutoff in Act 651, which is why his file and the new statute are related politically and not identical legally.
The medical-ethics problem is not abstract. A urologist who performs an orchiectomy for prostate cancer is treating a disease. A urologist who performs the same operation because a judge wrote it into a criminal judgment is participating in a punishment. Hospitals have bylaws. Insurers have coverage rules. A physician who fears a licensing complaint can decline the case, and Act 651 does not create a draft of surgeons. Corrections can contract, but a contract is only as good as a doctor willing to sign it. That gap is why observers still ask, two years after the effective date, whether anyone has actually been taken into an operating room under the new statute or whether every “castration sentence” so far is a future date on a plea form.
Child-sex prosecutions on this site are filed under crime news and U.S. news. Other sweeps, including Operation Bad Santa in New Jersey, show how often these cases move through plea bargains rather than trials. Act 651 did not invent that pattern. It gave Louisiana judges one more item to put on the plea sheet, and it gave the rest of the country a statute to watch when the first completed operation is finally confirmed.
Until a hospital confirms a date, a surgeon, and a discharge note, the honest description of the law is this: Louisiana authorized a punishment most states will not touch, two parish courts have already written it into guilty pleas, and the operating room has not yet become a public fact. That gap is not a technicality. It is the difference between a statute and a surgery. Families who want the harshest available penalty will hear the plea language and assume the sentence has already been carried out. It has not, on any confirmed public timeline. Watch the dockets in Vernon Parish and Bossier Parish. That is where Act 651 will either become a completed medical event or remain a line of text that added years of argument without adding a single operation.
