Anthony Boyd

Anthony Boyd was the eighth — and, as of this writing, the final — person killed by nitrogen hypoxia in the United States. He was 54 years old, had spent 30 years on Alabama's death row for the 1993 kidnapping and burning death of Gregory Huguley in Talladega County, and had founded 'Project Hope,' a peer-mentoring project inside William C. Holman Correctional Facility that had connected hundreds of men on death row with mental-health support and re-entry planning for other inmates. His federal petition to stay the October 23, 2025 execution reached the Supreme Court on the day of his execution.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent from denial of the stay — joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — did what no Court opinion had done to that point: it catalogued, in unflinching detail, the observable violence of every prior nitrogen execution and warned the Court against ratifying the method by silence. It became the intellectual scaffolding for the 11th Circuit's Lee opinion seven months later.

Inside the chamber, Boyd's execution set the new upper bound. Multiple media witnesses independently reported convulsions and gasping continuing well past every previous timeline — the longest visible nitrogen execution on record. The state again called the procedure 'textbook.' The record — Sotomayor's dissent, the eyewitness accounts, the autopsy — walked into the Lee bench trial the following spring as Exhibit A.