The Supreme Court blocked Alabama on Thursday night from using nitrogen gas to execute a convicted murderer, rejecting a last-minute appeal by state officials after lower-court judges found that the method was “likely unconstitutional” in this case.
The Supreme Court’s decision was unsigned and included no reasoning, which is typical in such emergency rulings. Dissent came from three of the court’s conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch.
The decision was a significant setback for Alabama officials, who planned to execute the condemned man, Jeffery Lee, 49, at 6 p.m. on Thursday. It also potentially sets the stage for a broader legal battle over the constitutionality of the execution method known as nitrogen hypoxia. Alabama became the first state to use it in 2024.
If the execution had gone forward as scheduled, Mr. Lee would have been the eighth condemned inmate in Alabama — and the ninth in the country — put to death using the method.
It is highly unusual for the Supreme Court to stop an execution at the last minute. Typically, the court receives emergency requests to stop executions directly from prisoners. In this case, however, a federal appeals court blocked Mr. Lee’s execution, and Alabama had asked the Supreme Court to overrule that decision.
“We won! Jesus did that,” Mr. Lee said in a call to his mother that was captured on video by his legal team.
State officials emphasized on Thursday that the court’s decision provided Mr. Lee with only a temporary reprieve.
“While I am disappointed the Supreme Court did not allow the state to proceed with Lee’s chosen method of execution,” Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama said in a statement, “I remain committed to ensuring that justice is ultimately served for his victims.”
In his legal challenge, Mr. Lee disputed claims from proponents of nitrogen hypoxia that the method is efficient and potentially painless. He even proposed death by firing squad as an alternative that he believed would be quicker and less painful.
In a decision late last month, Judge Emily Marks of U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama sided with state officials and said the execution could move forward, finding that using the gas “did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment.” But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit disagreed and sent the case back to Judge Marks.
In a new decision on Tuesday, Judge Marks blocked the state from executing Mr. Lee using the gas. This time, she agreed with his argument that death by firing squad — with four .30-caliber bullets aimed at his heart — “significantly reduces a substantial risk of severe pain.” Judges from the same appeals court affirmed her decision on Wednesday night.
The rulings did not address Mr. Lee’s death sentence, focusing instead on how it could be carried out.
Alabama had argued that it did not have a protocol in place for Mr. Lee’s suggested alternative of death by firing squad, or the necessary legislative approval or staffing. But as Judge Marks noted in her Tuesday ruling, lethal injection and electrocution are both legal in Alabama, and the state has experience using those methods.
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State officials noted that Mr. Lee himself had selected nitrogen gas as his preferred method of execution. He did so after Alabama passed a law in 2018 allowing the method, opening a window for death row inmates to choose it as an alternative to lethal injection.
But after the method was put into use, Mr. Lee was among a group of condemned inmates who filed lawsuits challenging its constitutionality, citing accounts from witnesses of “prisoners convulsing, shaking vigorously, and gasping for breaths,” according to one of the suits.
Mr. Lee has been on death row for more than 25 years. A jury found that he stormed into a pawnshop near Selma, Ala., in 1998 with a sawed-off shotgun and killed two people.
The store was owned by Jimmy Ellis, who had found a measure of fame outside Alabama as a masked singer named Orion who purported to be Elvis Presley living under an assumed identity after faking his own death.
Mr. Lee fatally shot Mr. Ellis and Elaine Thompson, who was his former wife. A third person, Helen King, was shot and survived.
The jury had voted to sentence Mr. Lee to life in prison, but the trial judge opted for the death penalty instead, using a practice known as judicial override. Alabama was the last state to give judges that power before changing the law in 2017.
Some legal experts argued that it was unfair for the state to put Mr. Lee to death using an outdated standard, and pushed for clemency.
But state officials did not budge from their position.
“The people of Alabama have not forgotten Jimmy and Elaine,” Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican, said in a recent statement. “I have not forgotten them. 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.”
Mr. Lee’s supporters and activists against the death penalty saw the Supreme Court’s decision as an incremental victory that could nevertheless go a long way in bolstering their efforts to challenge the legality of nitrogen hypoxia.
Nitrogen gas has been one option that states have turned to in recent years to maintain capital punishment as lethal injection drugs became more difficult to obtain. South Carolina, for instance, legalized death by firing squad, which the state has used three times since 2025.
With nitrogen hypoxia, a mask is placed on the inmate, forcing the inhalation of only nitrogen gas and depriving the person of oxygen. The method is supposed to render the inmate unconscious within minutes.
Proponents had presented it as a relatively fast method that causes less pain and is less prone to error compared with other approaches. But witnesses to some of the executions described a far more agonizing experience, with inmates writhing and repeatedly gasping for air.
“He was sitting there suffocating, trying to breathe for 19 minutes,” the Rev. Jeff Hood, a spiritual adviser to death row inmates in Alabama, said shortly after seeing Anthony Boyd convulse and heave for an extended period during his execution last year.
In a statement on Thursday night, Mr. Hood expressed hope that the outcomes so far in Mr. Lee’s case would represent “the beginning of the end” of the use of nitrogen hypoxia.
“That is not nothing, that is not small,” he said of the court decisions, most notably the Supreme Court’s. “Tonight, righteousness has shown up. It always does.”
