WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Alabama office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-AL), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, is urging the state of Alabama to halt its use of nitrogen gas as a method of execution, according to a CAIR-AL press release.
The call comes after the execution of Anthony Boyd, an Alabama man convicted of helping burn another man alive. In a statement to the Associated Press, Boyd maintained his innocence and condemned the failures of the criminal justice system.
“I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t participate in killing anybody,” Boyd said to the Associated Press. “There can be no justice until we change this system … Let’s get it.”
The CAIR release described the inhumanity of the punishment, detailing what witnesses saw during the execution process.
“He thrashed against his restraints and convulsed during the execution, his eyes rolled back into his head, and he gasped for air for 15 minutes until he died,” the release reads.
This marks the country’s eighth execution using nitrogen gas, according to CAIR, after a federal judge recently approved Boyd’s execution. The case moved to the Supreme Court, which allowed the execution to proceed, according to CNN. Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor led the dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“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,’” the dissent reads.
Critics of the nitrogen gas method and Boyd’s attorneys argued that it violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. The federal judge who declined to halt Boyd’s execution, however, stated that the Constitution does not guarantee a painless death, according to AP News.
CAIR-Alabama Staff Attorney Britton O’Shields denounced the punishment in a statement.
“We call on the State of Alabama to stop using nitrogen gas to carry out the death penalty in the wake of this latest horrific, botched execution,” O’Shields said. “Nitrogen gas has clearly and repeatedly resulted in cruel executions that needlessly prolong the person’s suffering. The fact that American states continue to use this nitrogen to slowly suffocate people to death is unconscionable. Alabama should lead the way in discontinuing this barbaric form of execution.”
CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell emphasized the importance of the Supreme Court’s dissenting opinion.
“We welcome the Supreme Court minority’s prescient and moving dissenting opinion in this case, which powerfully recounted botched executions using nitrogen gas and correctly predicted the horror that would unfold during this latest execution,” Mitchell said.
They added, “We also again call on states and courts to suspend the use of the death penalty nationwide as long as racial disparities continue to exist in its application and a substantial risk of wrongful convictions persists. As the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said long ago in a universal maxim, ‘It is better to make a mistake in forgiving than in punishing.'”
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