Anthony Boyd, sentenced for murder on May 19, 1995

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices on Oct. 23 condemned what they called the “intense psychological torment” a death row inmate will face when he becomes the eighth man executed with the controversial method of nitrogen hypoxia.

Dissenting from the majority’s denial of Anthony Todd Boyd’s request for a stay of execution, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked people to imagine what it would be like convulse and gasp for air while nitrogen gas is being pumped through a face mask.

The body’s instinctual urge to breath kicks in but the mind understands that breathing results in death, Sotomayor wrote in an 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,” she wrote. “The Constitution would grant him that grace. My colleagues do not.”

Boyd is being executed in Alabama on 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.

In the days leading up to the execution, Boyd pleaded to meet with Republican Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, saying in a taped message at a news conference that he's innocent.

"Please come sit down and talk to me before this execution is carried out, before an innocent man is executed ... and have a conversation with the guy that you deemed one of the worst of the worst," he said, adding that he had nothing to do with the crime. "Do the right thing and stop this execution."

Alabama made history when it conducted the first execution by nitrogen gas in the U.S. in January 2024.

Together, Alabama and Louisiana have executed seven people using the method, which Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall has defended as “constitutional and effective.”

Sotomayor said the method violates the Constitution’s ban against cruel and unusual punishment.

There’s a significant constitutional difference, she wrote, between the three to six seconds of physical pain and terror of being executed by firing squad and two to seven minutes of “conscious suffocation with its associated psychological pain and terror.”

Contributing: Amanda Lee Myers

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Supreme Court liberals condemn 'intense psychological torment' of execution by nitrogen gas

Reporting by Maureen Groppe, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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