Liberal Supreme Court justices decry nitrogen hypoxia executions: 'Excruciating suffocation'
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor led the court’s other two liberal justices in penning a dissent that condemned the use of nitrogen hypoxia in executions.
Sotomayor — joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan — wrote the dissent in response to the conservative majority’s Thursday decision to decline a stay of execution for Anthony Boyd, an Alabama man who was convicted of helping to burn a man alive in 1993 and had requested to be executed by firing squad.
The state of Alabama instead executed Boyd on Thursday night using nitrogen hypoxia shortly after the court’s decision to decline his petition.
In her dissent, Sotomayor asked readers to start a stopwatch and imagine the seconds ticking by.
“Now imagine for that entire time, you are suffocating,” she wrote. “You want to breathe; you have to breathe. 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.”
Sotomayor also wrote that Boyd had asked for the “barest form of mercy” in requesting death by the firing squad instead of through nitrogen gas.
“The Constitution would grant him that grace,” Sotomayor wrote. “My colleagues do not.”
By declining to hear his petition, Sotomayor continued, the Supreme Court had turned its back on Boyd and the Eighth Amendment, which guarantees against cruel and unusual punishment.
“There is a significant constitutional difference between three to six seconds of physical pain and terror and two to seven minutes of conscious suffocation with its associated psychological pain and terror,” she continued. “In gross numerical terms, nitrogen hypoxia risks extending the period of terror up to 140-fold.”
Boyd was charged with burning a man alive alongside three other men in 1993 and sentenced to death. He has maintained his innocence since he was charged, stating he was at a party at the time the murder took place. Prosecutors said he was not the group member who set the fire.
He proclaimed his innocence once again before the nitrogen hypoxia was administered.
"I just wanna say again, I didn't kill anybody, I didn't participate in killing anybody," Boyd said. "I just want everyone to know, there is no justice in this state."
According to witnesses cited by The New York Times, Boyd heaved and convulsed for about 15 minutes before he was pronounced dead — a length of time that exceeded the estimates of the Supreme Court’s liberal minority.
Alabama and Louisiana are so far the only two states in the country to have approved and carried out an execution using nitrogen gas, though state law in Mississippi authorizes the use of nitrogen hypoxia if lethal injection is unavailable. Lawmakers in other states have introduced legislation to add nitrogen hypoxia as an approved method of execution.