An Alabama man convicted of helping to burn a man alive was executed by nitrogen gas – a form of suffocation which defense lawyers have described as cruel and unusual punishment – on Thursday shortly after the US supreme court signed off on the seventh execution using the contested method.
Anthony Boyd, 54, was sent to the death chamber at the William C Holman correctional facility on Thursday evening.
“I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t participate in killing anybody,” said Boyd in his final words, per the Associated Press. “There can be no justice until we change this system … Let’s get it.”
He was strapped to a gurney and forced to breathe nitrogen through an industrial mask, fatally depriving his body of oxygen. He was pronounced dead at 6.33pm.
On Thursday, the six conservative justices on the supreme court denied Boyd’s petition for a stay of execution over the fierce opposition of their three liberal peers. Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote an excoriating dissenting opinion in which she invited readers to use a stopwatch to time four minutes.
“Now imagine for that entire time, you are suffocating … That is what awaits Anthony Boyd tonight,” Sotomayor said.
Boyd’s execution was the eighth time the gas has been used to kill a man after its initial experimentation by Alabama on Kenny Smith in January 2024. In March, Louisiana became the second state to deploy nitrogen as a killing method, with the execution of Jessie Hoffman Jr.
Advocates of the death penalty have embraced the nitrogen method, which they insist is an acceptable alternative to the prevalent execution method in the US, lethal injection. A boycott of medical drugs sold to corrections departments has made it increasingly difficult for states to procure the chemicals used in lethal injections, and as a result they have turned to other methods including nitrogen.
But the track record for this new killing procedure has been deeply troubling. The first prisoner to die by the gas, Smith, was seen by witnesses writhing and convulsing on the gurney.
At a recent hearing in federal court in which Boyd appealed against his execution by nitrogen, Smith’s widow, Deanna Smith, likened the process of watching her husband die to “watching somebody drown without water”.
The second person killed by Alabama using nitrogen, Alan Miller, also visibly shook and trembled for about two minutes in September last year. In the Louisiana execution, Hoffman was recorded still breathing 16 minutes into the procedure.
Boyd’s lawyers argued in federal district court that the method was a violation of the eighth amendment of the US constitution, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. They said that previous nitrogen executions had caused prisoners “extreme pain and terror of suffocation while still conscious, inflicting gratuitous suffering beyond what is constitutionally permitted”.
Earlier this month the federal judge in the case, Emily Marks, declined to stop Boyd’s execution from going ahead. She said she had no doubt that a person deprived of oxygen “experiences discomfort, panic and emotional distress”, but ruled that the constitution does not guarantee a painless death.
Boyd was sentenced to death for the murder of Gregory Huguley in 1995. Prosecutors said he was one of four men who kidnapped Huguley after he failed to pay $200 for cocaine, then doused him in petrol and set fire to him.
Boyd has always protested his innocence. The prosecution case depended on the testimony of an eyewitness with no forensic evidence connecting Boyd to the crime.
“I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t participate in any killing,” Boyd said when he phoned in to a recent press conference held by his supporters.
His death sentence was handed down by a jury vote of 10 to two. Alabama and Florida are the only states that allow people to be sent to death row on the basis of a non-unanimous jury verdict.
