Brace yourself for a story that cuts to the heart of justice and morality: the U.S. Supreme Court has turned down an Alabama inmate’s desperate bid to stop his execution, as SCOTUS Blog reports.
On October 23, 2025, the nation’s highest court declined to intervene in the case of Anthony Boyd, refusing to delay his scheduled execution or debate whether the method of nitrogen hypoxia breaches the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Boyd, convicted for the 1993 kidnapping and murder of Gregory Huguley, has been on death row for decades, a grim reminder of the slow grind of capital punishment.
Back when Boyd was sentenced, Alabama relied on electrocution as its go-to method for carrying out the death penalty.
By 2002, the state shifted to lethal injection, and in 2018, it introduced nitrogen hypoxia as another option, touted initially as a more humane approach.
Fast forward to June 2025, when Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall pushed for Boyd’s execution using this newer method, setting off a legal firestorm.
By July 2025, Boyd challenged the plan in federal district court, arguing that nitrogen hypoxia could cause severe pain and terror by suffocating him while he remained conscious for up to seven minutes.
The district court rejected his plea to pause the execution, finding insufficient proof that alternatives like a firing squad or medical assistance in dying would lessen the risk of agony.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit backed this ruling, leaving Boyd with one last shot at the Supreme Court earlier in the week of October 23, 2025.
On that fateful day, the justices issued an unsigned order denying Boyd’s request to halt his execution, offering no reasoning, as is typical in urgent cases.
Yet, not all on the bench agreed—Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, penned a sharp, nine-page dissent against allowing the execution to proceed.
“Boyd asks for the barest form of mercy: to die by firing squad, which would kill him in seconds, rather than by a torturous suffocation lasting up to four minutes,” Sotomayor wrote. Well, mercy might be in short supply, but isn’t there a point where punishment becomes plain cruelty?
Sotomayor’s dissent painted a chilling picture, noting that nitrogen hypoxia—once sold as a gentler alternative to lethal injection—causes conscious suffocation for two to four minutes.
She pointed to Alabama and Louisiana’s track record, with seven executions by this method, including the 2024 case of Kenneth Smith, who convulsed violently for minutes, shaking the gurney. Add to that witnesses reporting bulging eyes and thrashing in later cases, and you’ve got a method that seems more like torture than justice—hardly the “humane” solution progressive advocates might claim.
