An Alabama man was executed Thursday after spending more than two decades on death row despite a jury voting to sentence him to life in prison. Jeffrey Lee was put to death by lethal injection three months after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the state from carrying out his sentence with nitrogen gas.
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Lee’s execution was originally scheduled for June 11, but the Supreme Court made the rare decision to step in on the day of, after his attorneys raised concerns about the constitutionality of using nitrogen gas. The justices upheld a lower court’s ruling that the use of nitrogen gas violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Alabama has been leading the nation in using nitrogen gas for executions, amid a shortage of the drugs used for lethal injections.
Not the only one
Lee was sentenced to death in 2000 after murdering a well-known Elvis impersonator and his ex-wife/business partner and wounding a third person while trying to rob a pawn shop in 1998. A jury convicted him and voted 7-5 against the death penalty, instead choosing to sentence him to life in prison without parole. The judge in the case overrode that decision, putting Lee on death row.
Fear No Fact.
Eight people have been executed by nitrogen gas in the U.S., according to PBS – seven in Alabama and one in Louisiana.
His lawyers issued a statement on Thursday, condemning the state for going forward with Lee’s execution, calling it a “moral failure, not just a legal formality.”
The New York Times reported that Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey defended the execution, saying, “These victims have waited long enough, and I pray they can feel peace and have closure.”
Lee wasn’t the only Alabama inmate to be put to death by a judge’s decision even though a jury ruled against it.
In Jan. 2024, the state executed Kenneth Smith with nitrogen gas. He had also spent decades on death row after a jury voted 11-1 to put him away for life in a murder case, but a judge overruled them.
In Alabama, judges used to be allowed to overrule juries in capital murder cases. The state legislature stripped them of that ability in 2017, but that wasn’t before it happened in more than 100 cases. Nearly 20% of the state’s current death row inmates were sentenced to death by elected judges even after their juries chose life imprisonment without parole, according to the Equal Justice Initiative.
Only two other states allowed the practice — Florida and Delaware. They stripped judges of the ability in 2016. Alabama did the same in 2017, but it did not apply retroactively to cases already decided.
Before his sentence was carried out, Lee told WSFA 12 News on Wednesday that he believed it was unfair.
“I feel like I shouldn’t be on death row cause I’m one of the ones that got judicial override,” he said.
In their statement Thursday, Lee’s lawyers said, “A state that no longer stands behind the rule that condemned a man, but kills him under it anyway, has not delivered justice. It has revealed how little its own standards constrain it when it is determined to carry out an execution.”
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