Alabama executes Jeffery Lee after courts barred nitrogen gas

Alabama executed Jeffery Lee by lethal injection on Thursday evening, three months after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the state from killing him with nitrogen gas, ending a case in which a judge overrode a jury's vote for life.

Lee, 49, was pronounced dead at 6:22 p.m. at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, the state Corrections Department said. He declined a final meal, though he ate other food and snacks during the day. The execution got underway just after 6 p.m., CBS News reported.

"All is well. I just want to say to my family, I love them. To my brothers on life row, I love them," Lee said in his final words, according to The Associated Press. As the injection began he clenched his fists on the prison gurney, CBS News reported, and his spiritual adviser held his feet and appeared to pray. Lee closed his eyes and did not appear to open them again.

A jury voted for life

The killings happened 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 at the shop and Ellis's ex-wife, were shot and killed. A third employee survived by playing dead.

Ellis, a singer whose voice resembled Presley's, had gained a national following for a time as an Elvis impersonator, performing in a mask as "Orion" and becoming the subject of a 2015 documentary.

The surviving witness testified that Lee came into the store, asked to see wedding rings and said he would be back after getting money from his grandmother, according to CBS News. He returned a short time later with a sawed-off shotgun and shot Ellis, Thompson and the other employee. The witness fell to the floor, pretended to be dead and called 911 once Lee left.

Lee was convicted in 2000 of two counts of capital murder and attempted murder. The jury voted 7-5 to recommend life without parole, and the trial judge overrode that recommendation and sentenced him to death. Alabama abolished judicial override in 2017, but the change was not retroactive, leaving Lee among about two dozen prisoners on the state's death row whose juries had chosen life.

Rally outside the Alabama Capitol

Supporters of Lee's clemency bid rallied outside the Alabama Capitol on Tuesday under a banner reading "HONOR THE JURY." The ACLU of Alabama also petitioned for clemency, arguing that prisoners sentenced under the abolished override practice should be covered by the 2017 change.

"If we've made a determination as a state that this is the law going forward, it's only appropriate and fair and just to apply that same law to the people that are currently on death row with those verdicts," Alison Mollman, legal director for the ACLU of Alabama, told WHNT in remarks reported by NewsOne.

Gov. Kay Ivey refused to commute the sentence. "In June, after Mr. Lee attempted to avoid his deserved death sentence, I reaffirmed my commitment that justice would ultimately be served," she said in a statement on Thursday, according to NBC News.

Lee spent nearly 26 years on death row. Department of Corrections records showed he had 17 visitors and three phone calls on Sept. 16, and six visitors and no calls on the day of his execution. He had become a Christian in prison and expressed remorse for the shootings, telling an interviewer he did not fear dying because he believed he knew where he would go, NewsOne reported.

A 2018 agreement on method

Lee sued Alabama in 2016 over its lethal injection protocol and agreed to drop the lawsuit in 2018 after the state committed that "if he is to be executed, defendants will carry out that execution by nitrogen hypoxia." He had elected nitrogen years before Alabama developed a protocol for it. The attorney general's office told the Supreme Court that nothing precluded the 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.

"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," Lee's attorney wrote in the filing with the high court.

His lawyers argued the state was bound by the 2018 terms and said it could revise its nitrogen protocol to make it constitutional or use a firing squad. Lee also asked to die by firing squad, a method Alabama does not authorize. Lethal injection remains the state's primary method and was the subject of a state review in 2022 after past executions failed, NBC News reported.

After the execution, Lee's attorneys said Alabama "chose to execute Jeffery Lee by lethal injection, an equally problematic method it had told a federal court in 2018 it would not use." Before Thursday they had said Lee was not trying to stop his execution permanently but wanted the state to use the method he chose.

What the judges found

Alabama had planned to execute Lee on June 11 using nitrogen gas. District Judge Emily Marks first ruled that nitrogen did not amount to cruel and unusual punishment. After she was reversed on appeal in June and the case was sent back, she found the protocol unconstitutionally cruel and a violation of Lee's Eighth Amendment rights, barring Alabama from ever using it on him. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found nitrogen executions most likely violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Two Supreme Court decisions

Alabama appealed to the Supreme Court after losing in both district and appeals courts. The justices denied Alabama's application for a stay or vacatur, leaving the rulings blocking the state's nitrogen protocol in place, and gave no reason. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch noted they would have granted it.

On Thursday the justices denied Lee's request to intervene, and the execution went ahead that evening. Attorney General Steve Marshall said afterward that the case against Lee had been overwhelming and unambiguous, and that the state had proved every innocent life is worth fighting for however long it takes, UNILAD reported.

The nitrogen record in Alabama

Lee sued last year to stop Alabama from using nitrogen in his case, arguing that the method induces "conscious suffocation" that "is cruel and unusual because it superadds terror and pain during the execution."

Alabama pioneered nitrogen gas in early 2024, and seven prisoners have been put to death by that method in the state since. Witnesses at those executions described prisoners heaving for long periods and convulsing and writhing against their restraints on the gurney.

Kenneth Smith, the first person executed with nitrogen, was denied oxygen while his family watched from the witness room at the prison in Atmore, and was pronounced dead 32 minutes after the curtains opened, having shaken and writhed for at least four minutes against a state prediction that he would lose consciousness in seconds. "It was the awfullest thing I've ever seen in my whole life," Smith's son, Steven Tiggleman, said on Wednesday.

Anthony Boyd, put to death with nitrogen in October 2025, was the last prisoner executed by that method in Alabama, and witnesses said it appeared to take longer than usual; one media witness reported that Boyd gasped for air more than 225 times. "Nitrogen doesn't put a man to sleep. It makes him drown in a room full of air," said the Rev. Jeff Hood, spiritual adviser to Smith and Boyd.

Twenty-seven people have been executed in the United States so far in 2026, and Lee's was the second in Alabama this year, CBS News reported. In Texas, a man was put to death by lethal injection over a triple murder at his neighbor's home, and a judge on Wednesday blocked Georgia's plan to execute a man who killed two real estate agents.