Alabama savagely gas-tortured a 7th man to death

Before Alabama savagely gas-tortured a seventh man to death—Anthony Boyd on October 23rd—in what many legal observers are calling the longest nitrogen-gassing in history, I insisted “someday and somewhere there’ll be a reckoning for these nitrogen-gassing executions. Civilized people will come together and force change. They’ll say: Enough of this bullsh*t that ‘nitrogen hypoxia’ is a humane execution method.” I concluded that “until then ‘Alabama’s torturous death penalty hums on,’ and humans continue to be treated the same as bloodily slaughtered hogs.”

I pointed out “Although it was unwanted by the victim’s son, Alabama savagely gas-tortured-to-death another condemned man on September 25th, Geoffrey West, the sixth human the state suffocated with nitrogen. [And I highlighted in prior essays after all of] these gassing-tortures— ‘Alabama savagely gas tortured a fifth man to death’; ‘Atrocity after atrocity in Alabama’; ‘Alabama gas-tortured a 3rd man to death’; ‘Alabama arrogantly asphyxiates another condemned man’; and ‘Alabama torture outrage muted and unconscionably insufficient’—[how each of] Alabama’s nitrogen-gassings are an abomination on the road to the descent of mankind” (and how this was true also when Alabama exported its nitrogen-gassing abomination to Louisiana).

Finally, before Boyd was tortured to death, I wrote “the actions that people take—or don’t take—will be indicative of how comfortable our nation is with repetitive nitrogen-gassing torture.” Agreeing—when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to stop the execution—Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her fierce dissent for the court’s liberal justices, wrote: “This Court thus turns its back on Boyd and on the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment.”

Following Boyd’s execution, the New York Times reported “Witnesses described seeing Mr. Boyd convulse and heave for about 15 minutes before being pronounced dead about 15 minutes later.” The Times recounted that “Lee Hedgepeth, a journalist in Alabama who witnessed the execution, said he counted Mr. Boyd gasp for air for more than 225 times before he was pronounced dead.” (Rev. Jeff Hood, a spiritual adviser to Mr. Boyd who was in the execution chamber, was also reported saying Boyd was “suffocating, trying to breathe for 19 minutes.”)

In pleading with her colleagues to stop Boyd’s physical and psychological torture—before it happened—Justice Sotomayor wrote: “Allowing the nitrogen hypoxia experiment to continue despite mounting and unbroken evidence that it violates the Constitution by inflicting unnecessary suffering fails to ‘protec[t] [the] dignity’ of ‘the Nation we have been, the Nation we are, and the Nation we aspire to be.’”

I respect Justice Sotomayor’s sharp and spirited rhetoric but ultimately I think it’s overly modest.

That could be because I opined in January 2024 with a physician in anesthesiology and intensive care medicine—before Alabama conducted its very first nitrogen-gassing at the end of that month—that “Alabama’s Nitrogen Gas Execution Will Be Cruel and Unusual Punishment.”

And it could be because, in September 2023, when I penned “Alabama’s Plan to Execute Prisoners With Nitrogen Gas Is Immoral,” I quoted Friedrich Nietzsche who philosophized: “Just as custom appears as a consequence of an era, a people, a direction of spirit, so morality is the result of the universal development of mankind.”

Naively—perhaps you might say—I charged: “If a nitrogen gassing execution ever takes place in this country, and worse, should nitrogen gassing executions become routine, the direction of our American spirit, our very morality, will be worse than sullied; it will be irretrievably lost.”

But though I think Justice Sotomayor could have been even more forceful, and more stinging in rebuking the conservative Justices for allowing nitrogen-gassing-execution tortures like Boyd’s—and the men who came before Boyd—to continue, I reiterate that I respect what she wrote. And especially as after a former client of mine, Demetrius Frazier, was gas-tortured to death by Alabama on February 6, I wrote “We can, each of us, through our words and our actions, paint a picture of nitrogen-gassings as something base, something below us, something unquestionably un-American and unacceptable.” Justice Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion in Boyd’s case is a leap in that direction.

Will it be ignored? Or will its eloquence be echoed and more importantly acted upon to stop more nitrogen-gassings—in Alabama and anywhere else in the nation and world—in the future?

Humans have the capacity to do what is right. And gassing humans to death is wrong. So wrong.