Alabama plans to execute Boyd with nitrogen gas tomorrow, an experimental method that involves suffocating prisoners to death. “There’s nothing you can do to prepare for something like that,” Boyd told me. “You can’t prepare a person for drowning.”

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In the years since, Boyd has challenged his conviction in the courts but no court has granted him a hearing to present evidence his post conviction lawyers have uncovered they say proves Boyd's innocence.

At the end of the three day trial, Boyd was sentenced to death by a vote of 10–2. Alabama and Florida are the only two states in the country that can send someone to death row even when all jurors don’t agree.

Unable to afford a lawyer, Boyd was represented by a court appointed attorney who was paid $1,000 for the case, and had worked for the prosecutor for 4 years. He was ill-prepared and forgot to call witnesses who were supposed to testify to Boyd’s alibi. He also failed to call a forensic expert.

The state’s medical examiner testified that Huguley had been burned alive. Asked whether there was anything in his findings linking Boyd to Huguley’s murder, the ME answered, “No, sir.”

The only witness to testify about Huguley’s death was Boyd’s co-defendant, Quintay Cox. Cox had tried to back out of the plea deal but changed his mind under threat of the electric chair. On the stand, Cox admitted to changing his story once he got the deal.

“One of them was on probation, and I think we got his probation officer to find him for us,” the lead investigator told me. “I mean, none of them just jumped up.” Their stories clashed; they couldn't agree on basic details and their testimony at times contradicted the facts prosecutors laid out.

When I looked closer at Boyd’s case, I was unnerved to find that he was convicted entirely on eyewitness testimony. There was no physical evidence connecting him to the killing so prosecutors relied on witnesses who were said to have been picked up at an illegal dice game.

Boyd was convicted under Alabama’s felony murder law, which allows prosecutors to seek the death penalty against so called accomplices, even if they didn’t kill anyone. In Boyd’s case, prosecutors agreed that he didn’t light the match that killed Huguley.

Huguley’s badly burned body was found in August 1993. A month later, police arrested Boyd and three co-defendants for the crime. Of the four, two were sentenced to death. One got life without parole. And another, who took a plea deal to testify against them, was freed in 2009.

(pt. 2) "Please come sit down with me, talk to me, so you at least will know one person who has been executed with this method. And then I ask you: would you want somebody that you love and care about to be executed with this method?

Anthony Boyd recorded a message to Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, asking her to meet with him ahead of his execution with nitrogen gas on Thursday. "Before an innocent man is executed come sit down with me and have a conversation with the guy that you deem one of the worst of the worst."