Alabama plans lethal injection after nitrogen execution blocked

Alabama is set to execute Jeffery Lee by lethal injection Thursday night, three months after courts blocked the state from putting him to death with nitrogen gas in a case that has intensified scrutiny of one of the nation’s newest execution methods.

Lee, 49, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection beginning at 6 p.m. at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in south Alabama. He was convicted of capital murder and attempted murder in the Dec. 12, 1998, shootings at Jimmy’s Pawn Shop in Orrville, a rural Dallas County town west of Selma.

Store owner Jimmy Ellis, a singer who gained a following as an Elvis Presley impersonator under the masked stage name “Orion,” and employee Elaine Thompson were killed. Another employee, Helen King, survived by pretending to be dead after she was shot.

Witness testimony at trial said Lee first entered the shop asking to see wedding rings and said he would return after getting money from his grandmother. He came back a short time later with a sawed-off shotgun and opened fire. NBC News reported that Lee was 21 at the time and had first entered the store with his brother and cousin.

Lee was convicted in 2000. The jury voted 7-5 to recommend life in prison without parole, but the judge overrode that recommendation and sentenced him to death. Alabama abolished judicial override in capital cases in 2017, but the change was not retroactive. Lee is among about two dozen Alabama death row prisoners sentenced to death despite jury recommendations for life sentences.

His supporters have pressed Gov. Kay Ivey to commute his sentence, rallying Tuesday outside the Alabama Capitol under the banner “HONOR THE JURY.” NBC News reported that Ivey has said she would not grant clemency.

The current legal fight centers on Alabama’s decision to switch execution methods. Lee chose nitrogen hypoxia in 2018, before Alabama had developed a protocol for the method, and agreed to dismiss a lawsuit challenging lethal injection after the state agreed that if he were executed, it would be by nitrogen hypoxia.

Alabama planned to execute him June 11 using nitrogen gas. U.S. District Judge Emily Marks blocked that execution, ruling the state’s nitrogen protocol was unconstitutionally cruel and violated Lee’s Eighth Amendment rights. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled in Lee’s favor, and the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, left the injunction in place without explanation.

Lee’s attorneys have asked the Supreme Court to stop Thursday’s lethal injection, arguing the state should not be allowed to use a method it previously agreed not to use. “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.

The Alabama attorney general’s office has urged the high court to let the execution proceed, arguing the injunction applied only to the nitrogen protocol and that Lee’s litigation changed the circumstances. “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,” state lawyers wrote.

Alabama first used nitrogen gas for an execution in early 2024. It has since been used in seven Alabama executions and one in Louisiana. Critics say the method is poorly understood and likely causes unnecessary suffering. NBC News reported that witnesses to nitrogen executions have described prisoners heaving, convulsing and writhing against restraints. Steven Tiggleman, son of Kenneth Smith, the first person executed by nitrogen, said, “It was the awfullest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”

Lee has said he is not trying to permanently avoid execution, NBC News reported, but wants the state to use the method he selected in a constitutional way. He has also asked to be executed by firing squad as an alternative, though Alabama does not authorize that method.