The Supreme Court late Thursday denied Alabama's emergency request to execute death row inmate Jeffery Lee using nitrogen hypoxia, leaving the state without a clear path to carry out a sentence handed down more than a quarter-century ago for a double murder at a small-town pawn shop.
The denial came just hours after Alabama filed its emergency application, racing to meet a 6 p.m. local-time execution window at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. Two lower federal courts had already ruled against the state, and the high court's refusal to intervene means those rulings stand, for now.
Three justices, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch, noted their dissent and said they would have granted the state's request to overturn the lower courts. The majority offered no written explanation for the denial, as NBC News reported.
The timeline compressed with unusual speed. On Monday, a federal district judge in Alabama found the nitrogen method constitutional. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals then reversed that opinion, ruling that nitrogen executions most likely violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The appeals court also ordered the district court to rule on the feasibility of a firing squad execution, a method not currently legal in Alabama.
With both the district and appeals courts ultimately ruling in Lee's favor, Alabama filed its emergency application to the Supreme Court on Thursday. In that filing, the state described nitrogen hypoxia as a method that "rapidly causes death" and called it "humane, painless, effective, and reliable."
The American Thoracic Society filed a brief the same day in opposition, arguing that "nitrogen hypoxia executions cause intense, inhumane suffering."
The Supreme Court sided with the lower courts, and Lee was spared, at least from this particular method on this particular day.
Jeffery Lee, now 49, has sat on Alabama's death row for more than 25 years. The facts of his crime are not in dispute. Authorities said that on December 12, 1998, Lee, then 21, walked into Jimmy's Pawn Shop in Orrville, Alabama, west of Montgomery, with his brother and cousin. He told the owner he was looking at wedding rings for his girlfriend. He left. Minutes later, he returned carrying a sawed-off shotgun.
Lee shot and killed shop owner Jimmy Ellis and employee Elaine Thompson. He wounded a third person, Helen King. A jury convicted him in 2000 of two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.
His legal team has said a judge sentenced Lee to death even after a majority of jurors voted for life without parole. Alabama banned that practice, known as "judicial override", in 2017, but the ban did not apply retroactively to cases like Lee's.
That detail has become a recurring point of contention in Lee's appeals, though it was not the central issue in Thursday's ruling.
Alabama became the first state to use nitrogen gas executions in early 2024. The state has since executed seven prisoners using the method. Louisiana has carried out one nitrogen execution. Alabama's primary method of execution remains lethal injection, which it last used in April 2025.
But the nitrogen protocol has drawn mounting scrutiny. Media witnesses said it took 30 minutes for Anthony Boyd, convicted of helping burn a man alive in 1993, to be declared dead during the last nitrogen execution in October. The process requires prisoners to breathe gas through an industrial-grade mask while strapped to a gurney and deprived of oxygen.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a nine-page dissent in Boyd's earlier case, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. In that dissent, Sotomayor wrote that "firsthand accounts from those executions reveal that nitrogen hypoxia is not at all what it was promised to be." She added:
"Boyd asks for the barest form of mercy: to die by firing squad, which would kill him in seconds, rather than by a torturous suffocation lasting up to four minutes."
Sotomayor concluded that "the Constitution would grant him that grace" but that her "colleagues do not," accusing the Court of turning "its back on Boyd and on the Eighth Amendment's guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment."
Rev. Jeff Hood, a spiritual adviser who was present for two Alabama nitrogen executions, reacted to Thursday's denial by calling it "the beginning of the end of the most horrific execution method this country has ever devised."
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall did not hold back after the ruling. In a statement, Marshall said:
"Tonight's ruling is a miscarriage of justice, not for us, but for Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson, who Jeffery Lee brutally and senselessly murdered. I want their families to know that we will never stop seeking justice for Jimmy and Elaine."
Gov. Kay Ivey struck a similar tone, noting that the state retains the option to reschedule Lee's execution.
"While I am disappointed the Supreme Court did not allow the state to proceed with Lee's chosen method of execution, I remain committed to ensuring that justice is ultimately served for his victims."
Ivey's reference to Lee's "chosen method" reflects the state's position that Lee himself elected nitrogen over lethal injection in 2018. Lee's legal team filed a challenge to the nitrogen protocol last year and asked instead to die by firing squad, a method Alabama does not authorize. The high court has upheld other execution methods across the country, including lethal injection, electrocution, and firing squad.
Courts have blocked government action in other high-profile cases recently. A former Marine accused of training Chinese military pilots similarly failed to block the government's legal process against him, underscoring how rarely emergency appeals succeed once lower courts have ruled.
The Supreme Court's denial does not free Jeffery Lee. It does not commute his sentence. It does not declare nitrogen hypoxia unconstitutional in a binding, precedential opinion. What it does is leave in place the 11th Circuit's finding that the method most likely violates the Eighth Amendment, and it leaves Alabama scrambling for an alternative.
Lee himself spoke to NBC News by phone from Holman Correctional Facility on Tuesday, two days before his scheduled execution. He said simply: "God, he's not finished. He's still working, not only on my behalf, but on the other brothers' behalf that are still facing this situation."
Several questions remain unanswered. Will Alabama revert to lethal injection for Lee? Will the state pursue legislative authorization for a firing squad? How quickly can it reschedule? None of that is clear.
What is clear is that two people are dead because of what Jeffery Lee did inside a pawn shop in Orrville, Alabama, on a December day in 1998. A third survived with wounds. A jury convicted him. A judge sentenced him to die. And more than 25 years later, the families of Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson are still waiting for the state to finish what it started.
The method may be in question. The sentence should not be.