Alabama Executes Jeffery Lee, 49, by Lethal Injection After Supreme Court Halted Nitrogen Gas Attempt
Updated
Updated · The New York Times · Sep 17
Alabama Executes Jeffery Lee, 49, by Lethal Injection After Supreme Court Halted Nitrogen Gas Attempt
3 articles · Updated · The New York Times · Sep 17
Summary
Jeffery Lee died just after 6 p.m. Central on Thursday at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Alabama, three months after the Supreme Court stopped his scheduled execution.
The June 11 intervention blocked Alabama from using nitrogen gas, after Lee's lawyers raised constitutional doubts about the method, but it left his death sentence intact and allowed the state to switch to lethal injection.
Lee was sentenced to death in 2000 for a 1998 pawnshop shooting near Selma that killed owner Jimmy Ellis Sr. and his ex-wife and business partner Elaine Thompson, and wounded employee Helen King.
A jury had voted for life without parole, but the trial judge overrode that recommendation and imposed death under a practice Alabama later outlawed in 2017 without making the change retroactive.