Since June 11 when, without explanation, the Supreme Court let stand a decision from a lower court refusing to allow Alabama to gas convicted murderer Jeffery Lee with nitrogen, legal observers have issued a variety of opinions as to whether the Court’s decision was based on procedural or on substantive grounds—that gassing human beings to death with nitrogen is cruel and unusual punishment.

Some have posited Anthony Boyd was the last man to be tortured to death in Alabama—and in the United States—via “nitrogen hypoxia,” a crude and brutish method where an industrial mask is secured over a condemned prisoner’s face and nitrogen gas is pumped in prompting the prisoner to experience severe “air hunger” for minutes on end; as this severe air hunger occurs, prisoners have been seen thrashing around (despite being secured) on a gurney—convulsing, gasping, and contorting like fish out of water until eventually they are dead—deprived of the oxygen to support human life.

At this juncture, it is simply impossible to know whether a majority of the Supreme Court thinks that nitrogen-gassing is unconstitutional based on the record before it in Lee’s case—which included the first trial on whether nitrogen-gassing constitutes........

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