Alabama executes Jeffery Lee after court blocks nitrogen gas

Alabama executed Jeffery Lee by lethal injection on Thursday evening, three months after a federal judge blocked the state from putting him to death with nitrogen gas. Lee, 49, was pronounced dead at 6:22 p.m. at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, authorities said. He was convicted of killing pawnshop owner Jimmy Ellis, a singer who performed nationally as the masked Elvis Presley impersonator Orion, and store employee Elaine Thompson.

The execution got underway just after 6 p.m. "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. As the injection began, he clenched his fists on the prison gurney. His spiritual adviser held Lee's feet and appeared to pray. Lee closed his eyes and did not appear to open them again.

The U.S. Supreme Court denied Lee's request for a stay on Thursday, clearing the way for the execution to proceed. Gov. Kay Ivey, who refused to commute his sentence, set the September date after the state's plan to use nitrogen gas collapsed in court.

Jury voted 7-5 for life without parole

Lee was convicted in 2000 of capital murder and attempted murder. The jury that convicted him voted 7-5 to recommend a sentence of life without parole, but the trial judge overrode the recommendation and sentenced him to death. Alabama abolished judicial override in capital cases in 2017, ending the practice of judges changing a jury's sentencing decision. The law was not retroactive. Lee was one of about two dozen people on Alabama's death row sentenced to death despite jury recommendations of life.

Supporters of Lee's clemency bid rallied Tuesday outside the Alabama Capitol under the banner "HONOR THE JURY," urging Ivey to spare him on the ground that the jurors who heard the evidence had chosen prison. His attorneys made the same argument in their final court filings. Ivey did not grant clemency.

In a statement Thursday, Ivey said that "in June, after Mr. Lee attempted to avoid his deserved death sentence, I reaffirmed my commitment that justice would ultimately be served." She said that promise had been fulfilled for Ellis and Thompson and for their families, and that the case showed why the 2017 override law did not apply to death sentences already imposed. She said she prayed the victims' families could feel peace and have closure.

Lee was 21 at the time of the killings and had fathered two children. He spent nearly 26 years on Alabama's death row, where he served as a board member of Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty, an anti-death penalty group made up of death row inmates.

The 1998 robbery at Jimmy's Pawn Shop

The killings took place on Dec. 12, 1998, at Jimmy's Pawn Shop in Orrville, a small town west of Selma in rural Dallas County. Ellis, the store's owner, and Thompson, who worked there, were shot and killed. A third employee, Helen King, was shot and survived by playing dead. NBC News reported that Thompson was Ellis' ex-wife.

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. 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 after Lee left the store.

Ellis, 53, was a singer whose voice resembled Elvis Presley's, and for a time he had a national following as an Elvis impersonator. He performed as the masked singer "Orion," and his life was the subject of a 2015 documentary. Thompson was 44.

Attorney General Steve Marshall said the case against Lee rested on surveillance footage that captured him firing shots, eyewitnesses who confirmed what the camera recorded, and a confession Lee signed. Court after court and appeal after appeal, Marshall said, the record spoke with one voice and the verdict held strong.

Justice was finally served. The case against Jeffery Lee was overwhelming and unambiguous.

It can be easy over time to look at convicted murderers as old men rather than the dangerous killers they were when they stole their victims' lives, Marshall said, adding that the victims are the people he keeps in mind. Nothing can give back what was taken from Ellis and Thompson and their families, he said, but the state had proved that every innocent life is worth fighting for, no matter how long it takes.

Nitrogen protocol ruled unconstitutional in June

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." Both the district court and the appeals court ruled in his favor.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found that nitrogen executions most likely violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Alabama appealed. The Supreme Court denied Alabama's application for a stay or vacatur, leaving the lower courts' rulings in place and giving no reason. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch noted they would have granted it.

U.S. District Judge Emily Marks first ruled that nitrogen did not amount to cruel and unusual punishment. After the 11th Circuit reversed her in June and sent the case back, she found the protocol unconstitutionally cruel and in violation of Lee's Eighth Amendment rights, barring the state from ever putting him to death that way. Alabama had planned to execute him on June 11 with nitrogen, and the attorney general's office quickly filed paperwork seeking a new execution date at which he would be put to death by lethal injection instead.

Alabama tested nitrogen gas for the first time in early 2024, and seven prisoners have been put to death by the method since, according to NBC News. It is authorized in five states: Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Oklahoma. Witnesses at those executions have described prisoners heaving for long periods and convulsing and writhing against their restraints. The Rev. Jeff Hood, who served as spiritual adviser at two of them, said Wednesday that nitrogen "doesn't put a man to sleep" but "makes him drown in a room full of air."

A 2018 agreement at the center of the fight

Lee was put to death Thursday evening at the Atmore prison by a method Alabama had once told a federal court it would not use on him. He filed a lawsuit in 2016 challenging the state's lethal injection protocol and agreed to dismiss it in 2018 after the state agreed that "if he is to be executed, defendants will carry out that execution by nitrogen hypoxia." He had selected nitrogen years before Alabama developed a protocol for carrying it out.

His lawyers told the Supreme Court the state was bound by those terms. "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. They said Alabama could revise its nitrogen protocol to make it constitutional or use a firing squad, which Lee had asked for and which the state does not authorize.

The attorney general's office asked the justices to let the execution proceed, arguing 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," lawyers with the office wrote.

• Dec. 12, 1998: Ellis and Thompson shot dead at Jimmy's Pawn Shop in Orrville
• 2000: Lee convicted of capital murder and attempted murder; jury votes 7-5 for life
• June 11, 2026: scheduled nitrogen execution called off after courts find the protocol unconstitutional
• Sept. 17, 2026: Lee executed by lethal injection, pronounced dead at 6:22 p.m.

Lee's attorneys said after the execution that 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." Through the litigation they had said Lee was not trying to halt his execution permanently, but wanted the state to use the method he chose in a way that did not violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Kenneth Smith, the first person Alabama executed with nitrogen, 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, as his family watched from the witness room. "It was the awfullest thing I've ever seen in my whole life," Smith's son, Steven Tiggleman, said Wednesday. During the October 2025 execution of Anthony Boyd, the last person put to death with nitrogen in Alabama, one media witness reported Boyd gasping for air more than 225 times.

Twenty-seven executions in the United States this year

Twenty-seven people have been executed around the United States to date in 2026, and Lee's was the second in Alabama this year. In Texas, a man was given a lethal injection for his conviction in a triple murder at his neighbor's home. In Georgia, a judge blocked plans Wednesday to execute a man who killed two real estate agents.

The state Corrections Department said Lee declined a final meal, though the state said he had other food and snacks through the day. He had 17 visitors and three phone calls on Sept. 16, the day before the execution, and six visitors and no calls on the day itself.

About two dozen prisoners remain on Alabama's death row under sentences imposed by judges over jury recommendations of life, and the 2017 law that ended the practice does not reach them. Alabama's death row holds 159 prisoners, housed at Holman and at Donaldson.