US man executed with nitrogen gas for 1993 murder

Anthony Boyd, 54, earlier lost his appeal to be executed by firing squad by the state of Alabama.

The US state of Alabama has executed a man convicted in a 1993 killing, using nitrogen gas, a controversial method of execution that has been described by critics as a “cruel and unusual form of punishment.”

Anthony Boyd, 54, was executed on Thursday evening in the United States for killing a man by setting him on fire over a $200 drug debt.

Boyd has maintained his innocence in the case and repeated his position in his last words.”I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t participate in killing anybody,” he said on Thursday, according to CBS News. “There can be no justice until we change this system.”

Boyd’s death marks the seventh time that Alabama has used nitrogen gas on death row inmates since January 2024.

The method has been used instead of the intravenous lethal injection due to complications administering it and, more recently, in obtaining the cocktail of toxic drugs, according to the US-based Death Penalty Information Center.

The use of nitrogen gas is particularly controversial because it can draw out the length of an execution. Prior to his execution, Boyd appealed to several courts to be killed by firing squad instead, but his request was turned down.

The US Supreme Court also rejected his plea that nitrogen gas violates the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution that prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments”.

The court’s majority decision was opposed by the Supreme Court’s three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. In her dissent, Sotomayor described nitrogen gas as a “torturous suffocation” compared with other methods.

“Boyd asks for the barest form of mercy: to die by firing squad, which would kill him in seconds,” she wrote. “The Constitution would grant him that grace. My colleagues do not. This Court thus turns its back on Boyd and on the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment.”

Sarah Clifton, a local reporter who observed Boyd’s execution for the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper on Thursday, said the entire procedure took nearly 40 minutes from the time Boyd was strapped down to when he was pronounced dead.

The state turned on nitrogen gas at 5:57pm local time, but Boyd kept breathing and spasmed for more than 20 minutes until he lay still at 6:18pm, Clifton said. The gas was turned off by the state at 6:27pm, and Boyd was pronounced dead at 6:33pm.

Prior to his death, Boyd had spent 30 years in prison. He was sentenced to death in 1995 by a jury vote of 10-2 for the murder of Gregory “New York” Huguley, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The prosecution’s case was based solely on witness testimony with no physical evidence, the centre said. The legal case was also heard in an Alabama county that at the time had the “highest per capita rate of death sentences in the nation”, it said.