The State of Alabama is getting set to execute Jeffrey Lee for a double murder that occurred during a robbery in 1998
According to court documents Jeffrey Lee would enter a pawn shop in order to rob it and during the process would shoot and kill Jimmy Ellis, the owner, and Elaine Thompson
Jeffrey Lee would be arrested and convicted of the double murder. However when it came down to the punishment the jury would vote 7 to 5 to sentence him to life in prison without parole but the Judge in the case overruled the jury and sentenced him to death
Jeffrey Lee is scheduled to be executed by nitrogen on June 11 2026
Jeffrey Lee execution was called off at the last minute due to the Supreme Court having issues with the method of execution
Jeffrey Lee Execution News
Advocates are calling on corrections officers at Holman Prison to refuse to participate in nitrogen hypoxia executions.
The call comes days before Jeffrey Lee is scheduled to be executed by the controversial method, where an inmate breathes in pure nitrogen through a gas mask until he or she eventually loses consciousness and dies.
“One pinprick hole or one release of nitrogen could harm everyone in the room, which tells me that the state of Alabama is willing to dispense of their workers in order to carry out these nitrogen executions,” said Rev. Jeff Hood, founder of the Execution Intervention Project.
In an open letter that will be sent to Alabama Department of Corrections employees, the Execution Intervention Project said that participating in a nitrogen hypoxia execution is a choice they will not be able to move on from.
“We know that refusing a direct assignment is not a small thing, and that the professional consequences can feel overwhelming,” the letter said.
“We are not asking you to make a speech. We’re not asking you to take a public stand. We are not asking you to come out and participate in protests with us. We are asking you to exercise the most private and fundamental right any person has, the right to refuse to participate in something your conscience cannot endorse.”
Hood said during a press conference Friday that the Execution Intervention Project has funding for workers who fear they may lose their job if they refuse to participate in the executions.
AL.com has reached out to the Alabama Department of Corrections for comment.
Advocates noted during the press conference that they’ve had direct conversations with ADOC staff members who have expressed fear about taking part in executions.
“I do think it’s important for people to know there are people who have been in that room who are ashamed of what they’ve done, who are scared for their future, who have trauma and are scared for their kids finding out that they participate in these things,” Hood said.
The reverend added that after every nitrogen hypoxia execution, someone from the Department of Corrections has reached out to him for counseling and spiritual help.
As part of the campaign, the organizations have placed a billboard in Atmore that reads “Thou shalt not suffocate. Stop nitrogen executions.”
“We want those who work for the Department of Corrections, those who are neighbors with those who work for the Department of Corrections, those who are around those who work for the Department of Corrections to know what the employees of the Department of Corrections are involved with,” Hood said during the press conference.
Hood said they are targeting nitrogen hypoxia executions in particular because it “is particularly torturous and horrific, and we know that the courts have been very hesitant to step in.”
A federal judge ruled this week that Lee’s execution can go forward on June 11 after his lawyers requested a stay of execution, arguing the method is cruel and unusual punishment.
But U.S. District Judge Emily Marks ruled that the Constitution does not guarantee a painless death.
Alabama corrections staff urged to refuse execution participation – al.com
Jeffrey Lee More Execution News
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey has scheduled the execution of Jeffery Lee by nitrogen suffocation for June 11, 2026, even though his capital jury voted 7-5 against the death penalty and chose a sentence of life imprisonment without parole.
The trial judge overrode the jury’s verdict and sentenced Jeffrey Lee to death in 2000, relying on a unique Alabama practice that allowed judges to overrule jury verdicts in death penalty cases.
Alabama is the only state where judges overrode jury verdicts of life to impose the death penalty routinely—in more than 100 cases since 1976. As a result, nearly 20% of the people currently on Alabama’s death row were sentenced to death by elected judges even after their juries chose life imprisonment without parole.
Florida and Delaware—the only other states that permitted judge override—ended it in 2016. Alabama became the last state to abolish judge override on April 11, 2017, but did not apply the change retroactively to cases like Mr. Lee’s.
Jeffrey Lee’s case demonstrates the arbitrariness of Alabama’s death penalty. If his trial happened today—or at any time after override was abolished in 2017—he would have been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole as his jury decided. Instead, he is facing execution because his capital trial was held before 2017, when Alabama law still allowed a single official to override the judgment of the 12 people charged with deciding his fate.
The Alabama Legislature and Gov. Kay Ivey abolished judge override because they recognized it was wrong, former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court Drayton Nabers Jr. wrote in a recent op-ed. He called on the governor to commute Mr. Lee’s death sentence out of “fidelity to the conservative principles of limited government, respect for the jury system, and the rule of law.”
“A jury of Alabamians voted for life,” he wrote. “The state of Alabama later agreed that juries, not judges, should make that call. Governor Ivey can honor both of those judgments—the jury’s and the Legislature’s—by commuting Jeffery Lee’s sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.”
Unreliable Capital Trial
Mr. Lee, who is Black, was charged with the 1998 shooting deaths of Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson and attempted murder of Helen King during the robbery of a pawn shop near Orrville in Dallas County, Alabama. All three victims were white.
Located in Alabama’s Black Belt, Dallas County has a long history of racial injustice, and the prosecutor did everything he could to deprive Mr. Lee of a fair jury by using all 21 of his peremptory strikes against Black potential jurors.
Jeffrey Lee lived his whole life in chronic poverty and could not afford to hire a lawyer. He was appointed counsel who had never tried a capital case and did almost nothing to prepare for trial.
Jeffrey Lee was convicted of capital murder in 2000 after a trial that lasted less than two days. After a hearing where defense counsel presented no additional evidence in support of a life sentence, the trial judge overrode the jury’s life verdict and sentenced Mr. Lee to death.
Jeffrey Lee’s Transformation in Prison
Despite being condemned to death for more than 25 years, Mr. Lee, now 49, has become a Kairos ministry leader, an assistant chaplain, and a mentor to men on death row. The Catholic Mobilizing Network, which has called on Gov. Kay Ivey to grant clemency for Mr. Lee, writes that he is “a man of strong Christian faith” who has had no violent infractions during more than a quarter century in prison.
Execution by Conscious Suffocation
Last year, Mr. Lee filed a federal lawsuit challenging nitrogen suffocation as cruel and unusual punishment because it “causes inmates to experience prolonged air hunger and feelings of suffocation, which evoke severe anxiety, fear, and physiological distress.” The suit claimed the method cruelly superadds pain in violation of the Eighth Amendment because it triggers the person’s survival instincts to breathe oxygen while also preventing them from doing so.
Alabama’s use of the experimental method has raised serious concerns that it causes significant and lengthy suffering. Forcing a person to breathe nitrogen gas through a facemask until they die from lack of oxygen, Justice Sonia Sotomayor recognized, inflicts the “unnecessary psychological terror” of “conscious, excruciating suffocation” and “severe emotional suffering” while “consciously experiencing the ‘primal urge to breath.’”
After a bench trial, U.S. District Court Judge Emily Marks ruled on May 28 that “[w]hile Lee establishes that death by nitrogen hypoxia involves some suffering, he fails to show that the protocol is cruel and unusual in violation of the Eighth Amendment.”
The court found that people executed by nitrogen suffocation “likely experience severe air hunger,” which “results in profound physiological discomfort and distress, as well as anxiety, fear, and dread” and “can be worse than pain,” but this suffering is not unconstitutional because they lose consciousness “in not significantly more than one to three minutes” after nitrogen begins to flow into the mask.
In making this determination, the court rejected unrebutted expert testimony that purposeful movements—rolling, attempting to sit up to breathe, legs lifting up, lifting of the head, clenching of the fists, and pulling against the restraints—made by four people executed previously in Alabama demonstrated that they remained conscious for between three and seven minutes.
Alabama Plans to Execute Jeffrey Lee Despite Jury Vote for Life
