In Alabama, condemned prisoner Nathaniel Woods offered no final words Thursday night as prison officials strapped him to a gurney and injected a lethal cocktail of drugs into his body. Witnesses say Woods showed labored breathing and jerked against his restraints before he fell still and was declared dead at 9 p.m. local time. Woods was convicted in the 2004 murder of three Birmingham police officers and went to the death chamber professing his innocence. His claims were backed by Kerry Spencer, another death row prisoner convicted in the case who says Woods was in the wrong place at the wrong time and had nothing to do with the crime.

Republican Governor Kay Ivey ordered Woods’s execution even though more than 100,000 people signed a petition demanding she stop it. The U.S. Supreme Court briefly stayed the execution Thursday evening but lifted the order without comment after two-and-a-half hours. Martin Luther King III responded on Twitter, writing, “In the case of Nathaniel Woods, the actions of the U.S. Supreme Court and the Governor of the State of Alabama are reprehensible, and have potentially contributed to an irreversible injustice. It makes a mockery of justice and constitutional guarantees to a fair trial.” Later in the broadcast, we’ll speak with Adam Cohen, author of “Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America.”