Alabama Plans Lethal Injection for Jeffery Lee After Nitrogen Execution Blocked

Alabama is preparing to execute Jeffery Lee by lethal injection on Thursday evening, three months after a court ruling prevented the state from carrying out the sentence using nitrogen gas.

Lee, 49, is scheduled to receive the injection from 6 p.m. at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in south Alabama. He was convicted in 2000 of capital murder and attempted murder for the killings of two people during a robbery at a pawn shop in rural Dallas County.

The state had initially planned to put Lee to death on June 11 using nitrogen gas, but a judge stopped that effort. The attorney general's office then promptly sought a new execution date, this time by lethal injection.

Lee's legal team has made a final attempt to halt the execution, pointing to the jury's recommendation of life imprisonment, which the trial judge overrode. The jury had voted 7-5 in favor of life without parole. Alabama abolished judicial override in 2017, but the change was not retroactive, leaving Lee and roughly two dozen other death row inmates in similar circumstances.

His attorneys have also argued that the state should not be permitted to switch execution methods. Lee filed a lawsuit in 2016 challenging Alabama's lethal injection protocol. After the state authorized nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method, Lee chose it as his preferred option and agreed to dismiss the lethal injection lawsuit in 2018, on the understanding that any execution would be carried out using nitrogen. His lawyers contend the state is bound by that agreement and have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution to consider the issue. They have suggested the state could revise its nitrogen protocol or use a firing squad instead.

The attorney general's office has urged the high court to allow the execution to proceed, arguing that nothing prevents the switch to lethal injection and that an unpunished murder harms the rule of law.

The killings took place on Dec. 12, 1998, at Jimmy's Pawn Shop in Orrville, a small town west of Selma. Store owner Jimmy Ellis and employee Elaine Thompson were shot and killed. Another employee survived by pretending to be dead and called 911 after Lee left.

The surviving witness testified that Lee entered the shop, 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 opened fire. Ellis, a singer who had gained a national following as an Elvis Presley impersonator and performed as the masked singer "Orion," was the subject of a 2015 documentary.

Supporters of Lee's clemency bid held a rally Tuesday outside the Alabama Capitol under the banner "HONOR THE JURY."

Lethal injection remains Alabama's primary execution method, though the state began using nitrogen gas in some executions in 2024. Nitrogen has now been used in seven executions in Alabama and one in Louisiana. Nationally, 26 inmates have been executed this year, including a Texas man put to death for a triple murder at a neighbor's home. In Georgia, a judge on Wednesday blocked plans to execute a man convicted of killing two real estate agents.