The US Supreme Court has blocked Alabama from executing death row inmate Jeffery Lee by nitrogen gas, just hours before his scheduled execution, after lower courts ruled the method likely violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
The high court denied the state’s emergency application late Thursday, with Lee’s execution having been scheduled for 6pm local time. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented, saying they would have granted Alabama’s request to overturn the lower court rulings. Lee, 49, is now spared execution by nitrogen for the time being, though the state retains the option to pursue other methods, and it remains unclear how quickly it might do so.
The case had moved with remarkable speed in the days before the scheduled execution. On Monday, a federal district judge in Alabama initially found nitrogen hypoxia constitutional. Lee’s legal team appealed, and the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision, ruling the method likely breaches the Eighth Amendment and ordering the district court to assess the feasibility of execution by firing squad instead. With both courts ultimately ruling in Lee’s favour, Alabama turned to the Supreme Court for an emergency order.
Nitrogen hypoxia requires prisoners to breathe pure nitrogen through an industrial-grade mask while strapped to a gurney, depriving them of oxygen. In its Supreme Court filing, Alabama described the method as “humane, painless, effective, and reliable,” saying it “rapidly causes death.” The American Thoracic Society took the opposite view in a brief opposing the state, stating that “nitrogen hypoxia executions cause intense, inhumane suffering.”
The method has drawn intense scrutiny since Alabama became the first state to use it in early 2024. Witnesses to the state’s most recent nitrogen execution, of Anthony Boyd in October, described him shaking on the gurney, struggling against restraints and gasping for air for roughly 30 minutes before being declared dead. The Supreme Court declined to intervene in that case, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a nine-page dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, stating: “Firsthand accounts from those executions reveal that nitrogen hypoxia is not at all what it was promised to be. 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. The Constitution would grant him that grace. My colleagues do not. This Court thus turns its back on Boyd and on the Eighth Amendment’s guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment.”
Alabama has now executed seven prisoners by nitrogen gas, while Louisiana has executed one. The state’s primary method remains lethal injection, last used in April 2025, though sourcing the necessary drugs has grown increasingly difficult in recent years.
Lee was convicted in 2000 of murdering Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson and attempting to murder Helen King during a robbery at Jimmy’s Pawn Shop west of Montgomery on 12 December 1998. He had initially left the store claiming he had no money, then returned minutes later with a sawed-off shotgun and opened fire. He has spent nearly 27 years on death row and has requested execution by firing squad — a method not currently authorised in Alabama.
Lee’s legal team has separately asked Governor Kay Ivey to commute his sentence, noting that the trial judge sentenced him to death in 2000 after a majority of jurors had instead voted for life without parole — a practice known as judicial override that was banned in Alabama in 2017, though not applied retroactively to existing cases. Ivey’s spokesperson said Wednesday the governor “remains prepared to move forward with the planned execution.” State Attorney General Steve Marshall said: “Anything short of carrying out the sentence imposed by the court falls short of justice for the victims, and that is not what victims of this state deserve.”
Speaking to NBC News by phone from Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore on Tuesday, Lee said he had found redemption through his Christian faith. “God — he’s not finished,” he said. “He’s still working, not only on my behalf, but on the other brothers’ behalf that are still facing this situation.”
