Tortured to Death in Alabama

The state of Alabama has proved that it’s incapable of constantly finishing up executions that conform to the Eighth Amendment’s ban on merciless and strange punishment. After a collection of botched deadly injections in 2022, correctional officers in Alabama ushered in a brand new methodology of execution that will sidestep the authorized challenges ensuing from these debacles. This new methodology quantities to suffocation by fuel, particularly by the inhalation of pure nitrogen, a way that was proposed by a California screenwriter in a 1995 National Review article titled “Killing With Kindness: Capital Punishment by Nitrogen Asphyxiation.” Unlike previous execution methods recognized for horrendous and grisly outcomes—akin to hanging, electrocution, poison fuel, and deadly injection—nitrogen hypoxia was promised to be humane and painless.

That experiment has completely failed. Yesterday, Alabama executed Anthony Boyd, a 54-year-old man who was convicted of a 1993 homicide associated to a drug transaction. (Boyd maintained his innocence all through his incarceration, and reiterated it in his ultimate phrases.) Prior nitrogen suffocations in Alabama had been deeply troubled—Kenneth Eugene Smith, the primary sufferer of execution by nitrogen hypoxia on this planet, reportedly remained aware for a number of minutes after inhaling the deadly fuel, thrashing uncontrollably on the gurney. Nevertheless, correctional officers determined to topic Boyd to the identical ghastly course of. But Boyd’s execution was, in line with the Alabama reporter Lee Hedgepeth, much more spectacularly brutal than Smith’s. Strapped down with a fuel masks affixed to his face, Boyd gasped for air greater than 200 occasions. His eyes rolled again totally as his physique strained and shuddered towards his restraints. Boyd took greater than half-hour to die, making his execution essentially the most protracted nitrogen suffocation in historical past.

Prisoners in Alabama are sequenced for execution by a secret calculus recognized solely to state officers, and I discover myself questioning if Boyd was prioritized particularly as a result of he was subtle and considerate: He served because the chairman of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty, a prisoner-led advocacy group dedicated to ending capital punishment. I met Boyd in 2022 by means of his work with Project Hope; he was clever, sensible, and shrewd. He was all the time obtainable to reply questions or brainstorm concepts, although he was cautious to keep away from remark by hostile jail officers.

From the July 2025 subject: Inside America’s loss of life chambers

Boyd’s aspirations had been increased than protesting his personal execution. He wished to deliver in regards to the destruction of capital punishment in Alabama altogether, publishing a newsletter referred to as On Wings of Hope, which chronicled the lives and considerations of males going through loss of life. “As you all know, right now I’m in a battle for my life and justice,” Boyd wrote in his ultimate editorial for the e-newsletter. “I would love to tell all of you that I believe truth, justice, and human dignity will prevail, but we’re in Alabama where such things are few and far between.” Boyd famous that the state had questioned him repeatedly about his previous work for PHADP. “We are not out numbered, we are not organized,” Boyd wrote, an exhortation for these to comply with in his footsteps. “Keep fighting and keep Hope Alive. Be the other voice, until you are heard.”

Boyd famous in that final missive that “courts have become so hell bent on helping states preserve their killing machines that they’ve lost their compass, and the reason they went into law in the first place … JUSTICE!” He was totally proper, and his rivalry was validated in a dissent issued by Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to his ultimate Court enchantment. “You want to breathe; you have to breathe,” Sotomayor wrote in an evocative passage, “but you are strapped to a gurney with a mask on your face pumping your lungs with nitrogen gas. Your mind knows that the gas will kill you. But your body keeps telling you to breathe. That is what awaits Anthony Boyd tonight.” In allowing Boyd’s suffocation, she added, “this Court thus turns its back on Boyd and on the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment.” Sotomayor’s prediction has now been proved prescient, although the percentages that extra of her fellow justices will heed her considerations the following time round stay low.

Throughout American historical past, states have struggled to adjust to the Eighth Amendment whereas finishing up executions, flitting from methodology to methodology as every is tried and fails. Nitrogen hypoxia is barely the most recent on this long-term quest for a humane type of execution. All alongside, this effort has been absurd; there is no such thing as a option to kill somebody with out some aspect of torture, both psychological, bodily, or each. And though states and the federal authorities may proceed testing varied novel strategies of execution, the stress to find a feasibly humane option to execute has by no means been decrease, exactly as a result of, as Boyd and Sotomayor each identified, courts not appear invested in defending the constitutional rights of incarcerated residents. Boyd’s mission to rid Alabama of the loss of life penalty could nicely succeed within the very long term, because the loss of life penalty has by many measures declined over the course of time. But within the close to time period, there could also be rather more torture forward.