Alabama executed a man using nitrogen gas on Thursday night, causing him to gasp for an extended period of time and spurring more concerns over the execution method, which was used for the first time in the United States last year.
The man, Anthony Boyd, 54, was put to death at a prison in Atmore, Ala., for the 1993 killing of a man who had owed him and others money.
The U.S. Supreme Court had declined to intervene, over the strenuous objection of the court’s three liberal justices. In a dissent issued Thursday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor described nitrogen hypoxia as a “cruel form of execution” that should not be allowed to continue.
Witnesses described seeing Mr. Boyd convulse and heave for about 15 minutes before being pronounced dead about 15 minutes later. He was the eighth person killed by the use of nitrogen gas, which proponents of the method had said they hoped would be more humane than lethal injection, since Alabama first used it in January 2024.
Prison officials there do not disclose exactly when they turn on the gas that flows into a prisoner’s mask, which makes it impossible to know exactly how long the execution takes. The protocol calls for keeping the nitrogen flowing for five minutes after a prisoner’s heart has stopped beating.
“He was sitting there, suffocating, trying to breathe for 19 minutes,” said the Rev. Jeff Hood, a spiritual adviser to Mr. Boyd who was in the execution chamber and has witnessed several other executions, including by nitrogen gas.
Alabama became the first state to use nitrogen gas in an execution in January 2024, after it and other states had problems procuring the necessary drugs for lethal injections. Proponents of the method say that nitrogen hypoxia is less painful and less prone to error, but witnesses have at times described difficult-to-watch scenes in which prisoners writhe on the gurney before they are pronounced dead.
Mr. Boyd had chosen the nitrogen method over lethal injection in 2018, when prisoners were given a month to choose. But he later challenged its use, arguing earlier this year in court that the method was cruel and that the state’s protocol was inadequate.
Mr. Boyd had been convicted of murder in the 1993 group kidnapping and killing of Gregory Huguley, who purportedly had owed the group $200 for cocaine. A jury found that Mr. Boyd, who was 21 at the time, had participated in the kidnapping, in which Mr. Huguley was bound and taped to a park bench, where another member of the group doused him in gasoline and lit him on fire. The man who was convicted of lighting the fire remains on death row in Alabama.
Mr. Boyd’s execution was the 40th in the United States this year, the highest number since 2012, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Six more are scheduled to take place before the year ends.
Annual executions had been on a general decline since a peak of 98 in 1999, but the number has risen significantly this year, driven in large part by Florida, which has executed 14 people. There is also new pressure from the Trump administration to pursue executions. On his first day in office, President Trump told the Justice Department to encourage state and local prosecutors to seek the death penalty for all capital crimes.
Louisiana became the second state to use nitrogen in an execution in March. Three other states have also approved the method, but have not yet used it. Supporters say that it can be preferable to lethal injection, the method used in several botched executions, and that nitrogen easier to procure.
One state, South Carolina, has also employed the firing squad, a method used rarely in modern times, to kill two men on death row this year.
In Alabama on Thursday, Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, issued a statement in which she described the harrowing nature of Mr. Hugueley’s death.
“After 30 years on death row, Anthony Boyd’s death sentence has been carried out, and his victim’s family has finally received justice,” she said.
Mr. Hood, the spiritual adviser and a death penalty opponent, was also in the room for the January 2024 nitrogen execution, of Kenneth Smith, and said Mr. Boyd’s execution had “made Kenny’s look tame.”
John Hamm, the commissioner of Alabama’s prison system, acknowledged at a news conference that he believed Thursday’s execution was the state’s longest by nitrogen but that he considered it to have followed the state’s protocol.
Lee Hedgepeth, a journalist in Alabama who witnessed the execution, said he counted Mr. Boyd gasp for air more than 225 times before he was pronounced dead.
Justice Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. In it, Justice Sotomayor urged people to open the stopwatch app on their phone and run it until it reached four minutes.
“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.”
That, she warned, was what awaited Mr. Boyd.
In Mr. Boyd’s final statement from the gurney, according to Mr. Hedgepeth and reporters from The Associated Press and AL.com, he said that he was innocent and that he had not participated in killing anyone. He said that his execution was motivated by “revenge” and that it was not about closure “because closure comes from within.”
“Let’s get it,” he concluded.
Eduardo Medina contributed reporting.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports for The Times on national stories across the United States with a focus on criminal justice.
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