Alabama executed the seventh inmate in the state with nitrogen hypoxia just hours after the Supreme Court's three liberal judges condemned the relatively new method as causing "intense psychological torment."
Anthony Todd Boyd, 54, was executed on Thursday, Oct. 23, for the 1993 murder of a man named Gregory Huguley, who was taped up and burned alive over a $200 cocaine debt, according to court documents. He was pronounced dead at 6:33 p.m. CT, according to state officials.
"After 30 years on death row, Anthony Boyd’s death sentence has been carried out, and his victim’s family has finally received justice," Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said in a statement following the execution.
Boyd − who didn't set the fatal fire and had always maintained he wasn't even at the crime scene − requested that Alabama use a different execution method, such as the firing squad. The state has denied him, something Justice Sonia Sotomayor condemned in a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“Boyd asks for the barest form of mercy: to die by firing squad, which would kill him in seconds, rather than by a tortuous suffocation lasting up to four minutes,” Sotomayor wrote in the dissent from the majority's denial of Boyd's request for a stay of execution.
