Alabama plans October execution for convicted killer

Anthony Boyd – Photo from Alabama Department of Corrections

Alabama has scheduled an October execution for a man who was convicted in a 1993 murder.

53-year-old Anthony Boyd is one of four men convicted in the killing of Gregory Huguley in Talladega County. Prosecutors said Huguley was burned to death after he failed to pay for $200 worth of cocaine.

Gov. Kay Ivey has set Boyd’s execution for October 23. He is scheduled to die by nitrogen hypoxia, a method that the state started using last year in addition to lethal injection.

Boyd has filed a lawsuit challenging the new method as unconstitutionally cruel. He suggested a firing squad, hanging or medical aid-in-dying as better alternatives. A federal judge has scheduled a September 4 hearing.

In 2018, Boyd had selected nitrogen as his preferred execution method, but at the time the state had not developed procedures for using it. Lawyers for Boyd filed a federal lawsuit in July based on descriptions of how other inmates shook on the gurney while being executed with nitrogen gas.

“Each prisoner previously executed by the State’s Protocol showed signs of conscious suffocation, terror, and pain,” lawyers for Boyd wrote in the lawsuit.

The Rev. Jeff Hood, a spiritual adviser who witnessed the first nitrogen execution and is now working with Boyd, said yesterday that he was “horrified” by what he saw at that execution, which he described as being “suffocated to death.”

The Alabama attorney general’s office has urged a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that there is “substantial evidence that nitrogen hypoxia is a painless way to die.” The state says the described movements in previous executions were either inmates actively resisting or “involuntary movements associated with dying.”

Huguley’s burned body was found August 1, 1993, in a rural ballpark in Talladega County. Prosecutors said that the night before, the men had kidnapped Huguley after he failed to pay for $200 in cocaine.

A trial witness, testifying as part of a plea bargain, said that Boyd taped Huguley’s feet together before another man doused him in gasoline and set him on fire.

At his trial, Boyd’s lawyers maintained he was at a party that night and did not commit the murder.

A jury convicted Boyd of capital murder during a kidnapping and recommended by a vote of 10-2 that he receive a death sentence.

Boyd has been on Alabama’s death row since 1995. He is the current chairman of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty, an anti-death penalty group founded by men on death row.

Shawn Ingram, who was accused of pouring the gasoline and then setting Huguley on fire, was also convicted of capital murder and is also on Alabama’s death row.

Moneek Ackles was sentenced to life in prison without parole. A fourth man, Quintay Cox, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of murder as part of a plea deal. Cox was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole.

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