For the 8th Amendment, the shadow docket sleeps
By 
Alabama knowingly tortured someone to death earlier this week:
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.
Sotomayor’s dissent explains why this is incompatible with the cruel and unusual clause of the 8th Amendment:
Sotomayor describes several examples of nitrogen gas executions being torturous.
The Supreme Court’s current (perverse and immoral) standard is that states are allowed to inflict cruel and unusual punishments in the course of executing people unless the defendant can identify a less cruel and unusual method. Alabama is unable to meet even this bar here, because Boyd agreed to be executed by firing squad:
What explanation did the Court offer for permitting the execution to go forward? None, of course.