The three liberal Supreme Court justices took aim at their conservative colleagues for allowing the execution early Friday of an Alabama death row inmate who had raised claims about the state’s history of botching the lethal injection process. The inmate, James Barber, said the execution would violate his right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment.

The decision denying his request for a stay “allows Alabama to experiment again with a human life” and was “another troubling example of this court stymying the development of Eighth Amendment law by pushing forward executions without complete information,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.