The trial judge overrode the jury’s verdict and sentenced Mr. Lee to death in 2000, relying on a unique Alabama practice that allowed judges to overrule jury verdicts in death penalty cases.
Alabama is the only state where judges overrode jury verdicts of life to impose the death penalty routinely—in more than 100 cases since 1976. As a result, nearly 20% of the people currently on Alabama’s death row were sentenced to death by elected judges even after their juries chose life imprisonment without parole.
Florida and Delaware—the only other states that permitted judge override—ended it in 2016. Alabama became the last state to abolish judge override on April 11, 2017, but did not apply the change retroactively to cases like Mr. Lee’s.
Mr. Lee’s case demonstrates the arbitrariness of Alabama’s death penalty. If his trial happened today—or at any time after override was abolished in 2017—he would have been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole as his jury decided. Instead, he is facing execution because his capital trial was held before 2017, when Alabama law still allowed a single official to override the judgment of the 12 people charged with deciding his fate.
Nearly 20% of the people currently on Alabama’s death row were sentenced to death by elected judges even after their juries chose life imprisonment without parole.
“A jury of Alabamians voted for life,” he wrote. “The state of Alabama later agreed that juries, not judges, should make that call. Governor Ivey can honor both of those judgments—the jury’s and the Legislature’s—by commuting Jeffery Lee’s sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.”
Unreliable Capital Trial
Mr. Lee, who is Black, was charged with the 1998 shooting deaths of Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson and attempted murder of Helen King during the robbery of a pawn shop near Orrville in Dallas County, Alabama. All three victims were white.
Located in Alabama’s Black Belt, Dallas County has a long history of racial injustice, and the prosecutor did everything he could to deprive Mr. Lee of a fair jury by using all 21 of his peremptory strikes against Black potential jurors.
Mr. Lee lived his whole life in chronic poverty and could not afford to hire a lawyer. He was appointed counsel who had never tried a capital case and did almost nothing to prepare for trial.
Mr. Lee was convicted of capital murder in 2000 after a trial that lasted less than two days. After a hearing where defense counsel presented no additional evidence in support of a life sentence, the trial judge overrode the jury’s life verdict and sentenced Mr. Lee to death.
Jeffrey Lee’s Transformation in Prison
Despite being condemned to death for more than 25 years, Mr. Lee, now 49, has become a Kairos ministry leader, an assistant chaplain, and a mentor to men on death row. The Catholic Mobilizing Network, which has called on Gov. Kay Ivey to grant clemency for Mr. Lee, writes that he is “a man of strong Christian faith” who has had no violent infractions during more than a quarter century in prison.
Execution by Conscious Suffocation
Last year, Mr. Lee filed a federal lawsuit challenging nitrogen suffocation as cruel and unusual punishment because it “causes inmates to experience prolonged air hunger and feelings of suffocation, which evoke severe anxiety, fear, and physiological distress.” The suit claimed the method cruelly superadds pain in violation of the Eighth Amendment because it triggers the person’s survival instincts to breathe oxygen while also preventing them from doing so.Alabama’s use of the experimental method has raised serious concerns that it causes significant and lengthy suffering.
Forcing a person to breathe nitrogen gas through a facemask until they die from lack of oxygen, Justice Sonia Sotomayor recognized, inflicts the “unnecessary psychological terror” of “conscious, excruciating suffocation” and “severe emotional suffering” while “consciously experiencing the ‘primal urge to breath.’”
After a bench trial, U.S. District Court Judge Emily Marks ruled on May 28 that “[w]hile Lee establishes that death by nitrogen hypoxia involves some suffering, he fails to show that the protocol is cruel and unusual in violation of the Eighth Amendment.”
In making this determination, the court rejected unrebutted expert testimony that purposeful movements—rolling, attempting to sit up to breathe, legs lifting up, lifting of the head, clenching of the fists, and pulling against the restraints—made by four people executed previously in Alabama demonstrated that they remained conscious for between three and seven minutes.
Mr. Lee’s appeal is pending.
After a bench trial, U.S. District Court Judge Emily Marks ruled on May 28 that “[w]hile Lee establishes that death by nitrogen hypoxia involves some suffering, he fails to show that the protocol is cruel and unusual in violation of the Eighth Amendment.”
The court found that people executed by nitrogen suffocation “likely experience severe air hunger,” which “results in profound physiological discomfort and distress, as well as anxiety, fear, and dread” and “can be worse than pain,” but this suffering is not unconstitutional because they lose consciousness “in not significantly more than one to three minutes” after nitrogen begins to flow into the mask.
Mr. Lee’s appeal is pending.
Source: eji.org, Staff, June 4, 2026
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
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