Can marijuana smokers legally own guns? Supreme Court rules
Lower courts have ruled that past drug use does not violate the Second Amendment unless the gun owner is currently a high-level gun owner. The Department of Justice disagrees.
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices on Tuesday condemned the “severe emotional distress” faced by the eighth death row inmate executed using the controversial method of nitrogen hypoxia.
Dissenting from the majority’s denial of Anthony Todd Boyd’s request for a stay of execution, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked people to imagine what it would be like to convulse and gasp for air while nitrogen gas is pumped through a mask.
Sotomayor wrote in an opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson that the body’s instinctual urge to breathe begins, but the mind understands that breathing will lead to death.
“Mr. Boyd is asking for the bare minimum of mercy: not suffocation, which can last up to four minutes, but a firing squad that kills in seconds,” she wrote. “The Constitution will give him that reprieve. My colleague does not.”
Boyd was executed in Alabama on October 23 for the 1993 murder of Gregory Huguely, who was taped up and burned alive over a $200 cocaine debt, according to court documents.
In the days leading up to his execution, Boyd begged to meet with Republican Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, saying in a recorded message at a news conference that he was innocent.
“Before this death penalty is carried out, before any innocent person is executed, please sit down and talk to me…and have a conversation with the man you considered one of the worst of the worst,” he said, adding that he had nothing to do with the crime. “Please do the right thing and stop this execution.”
Alabama made history in January 2024 by carrying out the first nitrogen gas execution in the United States.
Alabama and Louisiana have collectively executed seven people using this method, which Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall defended as “constitutional and effective.”
Sotomayor said the method violates the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
There is a huge constitutional difference, she wrote, between the three to six seconds of physical pain and fear of execution by firing squad and the two to seven minutes of “the accompanying mental pain and suffocation of consciousness”.
Contributor: Amanda Lee Myers
