Alabama is set to execute convicted double-murderer Jeffery Lee by lethal injection Thursday evening, reverting to the very method the state once promised in a legal settlement never to use on him.
The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way hours before the scheduled execution, denying Lee's emergency request to intervene without offering any explanation. The 49-year-old has spent nearly three decades on death row for the 1998 shotgun murders of two people during a pawnshop robbery in Orrville, Alabama, a small town near Selma.
Lee's case has become a legal tangle that exposes a basic question about government accountability: can a state promise one thing in a binding settlement and then do the opposite when the first plan falls apart? Alabama says yes. Lee's lawyers say that answer shreds the Constitution.
On December 12, 1998, Jeffery Lee, then 21, walked into Jimmy's Pawn Shop with his brother and cousin. He left, returned with a sawed-off shotgun, and opened fire. Shop owner Jimmy Ellis and his ex-wife Elaine Thompson died. A third employee, Helen King, was wounded but survived by pretending to be dead on the floor as Lee fumbled with the cash register.
Ellis was no ordinary pawnshop owner. Under the stage name "Orion," he had spent the 1970s and 1980s performing as a mask-wearing, country-singing Elvis Presley impersonator, building a following that later inspired a 2015 documentary, Orion: The Man Who Would Be King.
King, the surviving employee, remembered Ellis in that film:
"I don't know why somebody would do that to somebody so nice as Jimmy. He made you feel like you're family."
A jury convicted Lee in 2000. A majority of jurors voted to spare his life and give him a sentence of life without parole. The judge overrode them and imposed death, a practice Alabama did not ban until 2017. Lee's case was not covered by the new rule.
Cases like Lee's highlight the broader tensions running through criminal sentencing nationwide. In Pennsylvania, lawmakers recently missed a deadline that opened the door for more than a thousand murder inmates to seek resentencing, a reminder that how states handle sentencing policy has real consequences for victims and public safety alike.
In 2018, Lee agreed to be executed by nitrogen hypoxia, a method Alabama was developing as an alternative to lethal injection. As part of a legal settlement, the state swore off using lethal injection on him. The deal appeared to close the question of how Lee would die.
But Alabama's nitrogen program ran into trouble almost from the start. The state pioneered nitrogen gas executions beginning in early 2024 and has put seven inmates to death using the method since then. The process involves strapping a mask to the inmate's face and pumping pure nitrogen through it, depriving the person of oxygen. Witnesses to those executions have described them in blunt terms.
Steven Tiggleman, the son of Kenneth Smith, the first person executed by nitrogen in Alabama, watched from inside the chamber. The execution took 15 minutes. Tiggleman told NBC News:
"It was the awfullest thing I've ever seen in my whole life. You got a scuba mask strapped to your face, and they're suffocating you to death."
Another inmate, Anthony Boyd, was the last person put to death by nitrogen before the courts intervened. His execution appeared to take longer than usual. One media witness reported Boyd gasping for air more than 225 times.
Rev. Jeff Hood, who served as spiritual adviser to both Smith and Boyd, offered his own assessment:
"Nitrogen doesn't put a man to sleep. It makes him drown in a room full of air."
Lee sued to stop Alabama from using nitrogen on him. Both a federal district court and the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the federal appeals court covering Alabama, ruled in his favor. The appeals court found that nitrogen executions most likely violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The Supreme Court then blocked the state from proceeding with nitrogen in a 6-3 ruling, giving no reason for its decision.
Hood declared after the ruling: "Nitrogen hypoxia is dead because of Jeffery Lee."
With nitrogen off the table, Alabama pivoted. U.S. District Judge Emily Marks agreed the state could execute Lee by lethal injection, reasoning that the federal injunction applied only to the nitrogen protocol, not to other methods. Governor Kay Ivey set a new execution date for this month and declined to grant clemency.
State Attorney General Steve Marshall had already signaled the state's intent. After the Supreme Court blocked nitrogen, Marshall said he was "prepared to do whatever is necessary to see Mr. Lee's lawful sentence carried out."
Lee's lawyers called the reversal a betrayal of the settlement. After Ivey set the new date, they issued a statement:
"After losing twice in federal court, Alabama now revives the very lethal injection method it promised to abandon. Alabama isn't complying with the Constitution. It's trying to outrun it."
The state's position, laid out in its Supreme Court response, placed the blame squarely on Lee. Alabama argued that Lee himself "challenged the very method he elected" and that, having won a permanent injunction against nitrogen, he could not also block the fallback option. The state noted that Lee's lawyers had suggested either revising the nitrogen protocol, without specifying how, or proceeding by firing squad, a method Alabama does not authorize.
The death penalty remains a tool prosecutors across the country continue to pursue in extreme cases. In Florida, the attorney general recently sought the death penalty against defendants accused of holding children captive for years, a sign that capital punishment still carries weight in states willing to use it.
Austin Sarat, a political science and law professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts who studies botched executions, framed the legal issue as a contract dispute with life-or-death stakes:
"There's a possibility that Alabama can't make it work. But you offered a choice. When we make a contract and enter into an agreement, the whole purpose is to bind us to perform against all future possibilities."
That argument did not carry the day. The Supreme Court denied Lee's final request to stop the lethal injection, clearing the path for Alabama to proceed Thursday evening. The court, which seldom stops executions, offered no written explanation.
Alabama itself had conducted a review of its lethal injection procedures in 2022 after past executions failed, a history that gives Lee's lawyers additional grounds for concern, even as the legal avenues have closed. Marshall's office did not respond to a request for comment the day before the scheduled execution.
Violent crime continues to test the justice system's capacity to deliver accountability. In Alabama alone, a military veteran and his wife were recently found dead in their home, with an acquaintance charged with capital murder, another case where the state may eventually face the same questions about how justice is carried out.
Lee has expressed remorse for the killings and told NBC News he found redemption through his Christian faith. In a prior interview, he said: "I don't fear dying, and nothing like that, because I know where I would be."
A family member of Jimmy Ellis declined to comment. More than 150 inmates remain on death row at Alabama's correctional facility in Atmore, where prior nitrogen executions were carried out.
Across the country, courts and legislatures continue to grapple with how to handle violent offenders. In Minnesota, a man who killed a state lawmaker was recently sentenced to life in prison, a reminder that every state draws its own line on the ultimate punishment.
Whatever one thinks of nitrogen gas or lethal injection, the people who walked into Jimmy's Pawn Shop on a December day in 1998 never got a choice about how they died. After nearly thirty years, Alabama is ready to close the case, and the courts have stepped aside to let it.
