Alabama Sets Lethal Injection for Jeffery Lee After Nitrogen Execution Is Blocked
Alabama is preparing to execute Jeffery Lee by lethal injection on Thursday evening, three months after a judge canceled his last execution date and blocked the state from putting him to death with nitrogen gas.
Lee, 49, is scheduled to receive an injection beginning at 6 p.m. at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in south Alabama. He was convicted in the 1998 killings of two people during a pawnshop robbery in rural Dallas County.
The state had originally planned to execute Lee on June 11 using nitrogen gas, a relatively new method Alabama first tested in early 2024. It has since been used multiple times in Alabama and other states, drawing scrutiny from critics who say the method is poorly understood and may cause unnecessary suffering.
Lee’s first execution date was halted by an unprecedented ruling from District Judge Emily Marks, who found Alabama’s nitrogen gas protocol unconstitutionally cruel and in violation of the Eighth Amendment. The decision barred the state from ever executing Lee with that protocol. The Alabama attorney general’s office quickly filed paperwork seeking a new execution date, this time by lethal injection.
Lee and his supporters have made a final effort to spare his life, pointing to the jury’s recommendation of life imprisonment, which the trial judge overrode. His attorneys have also argued in court that the state should not be legally permitted to switch execution methods.
The dispute has become a broader test of how states may change execution methods after a court blocks one protocol, while also renewing attention on Alabama’s legacy of judicial override—a practice that once allowed judges to impose death sentences over jury recommendations.
The case comes amid a busy year for executions in the United States. Twenty-six inmates have been put to death nationwide so far this year, including a Texas man executed by lethal injection for a triple murder at a neighbor’s home. In Georgia, a judge on Wednesday blocked the state’s plan to execute a man convicted of killing two real estate agents.
The Dallas County killings occurred on Dec. 12, 1998, at Jimmy’s Pawn Shop in Orrville, a small town west of Selma. Jimmy Ellis, the store’s owner, and Elaine Thompson, an employee, were shot and killed. Another employee survived by pretending to be dead.
The surviving witness testified that Lee entered the store, asked to see wedding rings and said he would return after getting money from his grandmother. He came back shortly afterward with a sawed-off shotgun and shot Ellis, Thompson and the other employee. The surviving witness fell to the floor, pretended to be dead and called 911 after Lee left.
Ellis, a singer whose voice resembled Elvis Presley’s, had gained a national following as an Elvis impersonator. He performed as the masked singer “Orion” and was the subject of a 2015 documentary.
Lee was convicted in 2000 of capital murder and attempted murder.
He is one of about two dozen people on Alabama’s death row who were sentenced to death despite jury recommendations that they receive life sentences. The jury that convicted Lee voted 7-5 to recommend life without parole, but the trial judge overrode the recommendation and imposed a death sentence.
In 2017, Alabama abolished judicial override and stopped allowing judges to change juries’ sentencing decisions in capital cases. The law was not retroactive, however, leaving Lee and others on death row under old sentences.
Supporters of Lee’s clemency bid held a rally Tuesday outside the Alabama Capitol under the banner “HONOR THE JURY.”
Lee’s attorneys have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution so it can consider whether the state may switch to lethal injection.
Lee filed a lawsuit in 2016 challenging Alabama’s lethal injection protocol. After the state authorized nitrogen as an execution method, Lee selected it as his preferred method. He agreed to dismiss the lethal injection lawsuit in 2018 because the state agreed that “if he is to be executed, defendants will carry out that execution by nitrogen hypoxia.”
His lawyers argue the state is bound by that agreement not to use lethal injection. They say Alabama could revise its nitrogen protocol to make it constitutional or use a firing squad.
“The petition asks this Court to determine whether the State may execute Mr. Lee by lethal injection notwithstanding its prior representation that it would execute him by nitrogen hypoxia,” his attorney wrote in a filing with the high court.
The state attorney general’s office asked the Supreme Court to let the execution proceed, arguing nothing precludes a switch to lethal injection.
“An unpunished murder is an intrinsic and ongoing harm to those interests and to the rule of law. Nearly twenty-eight years is decades too long,” lawyers with the attorney general’s office wrote.
For decades, lethal injection was the preferred execution method in the United States, until problems obtaining and administering the drugs led states, including Alabama, to consider alternatives. Lethal injection remains Alabama’s primary method. But in 2024, the state began carrying out some executions using nitrogen gas, which replaces breathable air with gas through a respirator mask and causes death by lack of oxygen. Nitrogen has now been used in seven executions in Alabama and one in Louisiana.