Jeffery Lee, 49, spoke his final words before Alabama put him to death by lethal injection on Thursday evening.
Lee was pronounced dead at 6:22 p.m. At William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, authorities said. His execution came three months after a judge’s ruling blocked the state from using nitrogen gas, the method Lee had selected years earlier.
“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 while his spiritual adviser held his feet and appeared to pray. Lee closed his eyes and did not appear to open them again.
The execution marked the second in Alabama this year and the twenty-seventh nationwide. It followed a protracted legal battle over the method by which Lee would die.
Lee had been scheduled for execution on June 11 by nitrogen gas, but that night the US Supreme Court declined to lift a judge’s ruling that the state’s nitrogen method violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The Alabama attorney general’s office filed paperwork the next day to set a new date using lethal injection instead.
Lee’s attorneys argued the state was bound by a 2018 agreement to use only nitrogen hypoxia. He had filed a lawsuit in 2016 challenging lethal injection, then agreed to dismiss it because the state promised that “if he is to be executed, defendants will carry out that execution by nitrogen hypoxia.” The state contended nothing precluded switching back to lethal injection, and the Supreme Court on Thursday afternoon denied Lee’s request to stay the execution to consider that question, turning it back without comment.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said Thursday evening that “justice was finally served.” Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey also issued a statement: “In June, after Mr. Lee attempted to avoid his deserved death sentence, I reaffirmed my commitment that justice would ultimately be served. Tonight, that promise was fulfilled for his victims, Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson, as well as for their loved ones who have long-awaited his sentence to be carried out.”
Ivey, who declined to intervene, added that the case “underscores exactly why” the 2017 law abolishing judicial override did not apply to existing death sentences. A jury had voted 7-5 to give Lee life imprisonment, but a judge overrode that recommendation and sentenced him to death. Alabama abolished judicial override in 2017, though the change was not retroactive.
Supporters of Lee’s unsuccessful clemency bid held a rally Tuesday outside the Alabama Capitol under the banner “HONOR THE JURY” and gathered in a vigil Thursday night outside the Alabama Governor’s Mansion.
“His death sentence rested solely on judicial override — an old law that Alabama has repealed,” Lee’s attorneys said in a statement after the execution. “The State itself concluded this practice was wrong enough to abandon yet still put a man to death under it. That is a moral failure, not just a legal formality.”
Lee was convicted in 2000 of capital murder and attempted murder for the Dec. 12, 1998, killings at Jimmy’s Pawn Shop in Orrville, a small town about 65 miles west of Montgomery. The surviving witness testified that Lee entered the store, asked to see wedding rings, and said he would be back after getting money from his grandmother. He returned shortly with a sawed-off shotgun and shot owner Jimmy Ellis, employee Elaine Thompson, and the other employee, who fell to the floor pretending to be dead and called 911 once Lee left. Ellis, whose voice resembled Elvis Presley’s, had gained a national following as an Elvis impersonator who performed as the masked singer “Orion” and was the subject of a 2015 documentary.
Nitrogen gas, which involves replacing breathable air with gas through a respirator mask causing death from lack of oxygen, has now been used in seven executions in Alabama and one in Louisiana after the state began the method in 2024.