Federal judge blocks Alabama execution as death row fight continues

A federal judge halted Jeffery Lee’s scheduled execution in Alabama, stopping the state just as it was poised to carry out one of its most disputed death-penalty cases. The 49-year-old inmate remained housed at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore after the ruling, with his fate still tied up in litigation over how Alabama can lawfully put him to death.

Lee said in a phone interview from death row that he was “emotional” when he heard the news. He described an “expected sigh of relief,” but said he still had to keep fighting and added that his faith is everything.

The legal fight centers on Alabama’s use of nitrogen hypoxia, the execution method that sends pure nitrogen gas through a mask to deprive a prisoner of oxygen. Lee was scheduled to be executed on Thursday, June 11, 2026, and would have become the ninth person in the United States executed by nitrogen hypoxia. Alabama pioneered the method in 2024; seven of the prior nitrogen executions took place in Alabama and one in Louisiana.

Lee filed a lawsuit challenging the method in August. During a three-day bench trial in February, testimony described nitrogen executions as causing “severe air hunger” and producing “extreme emotional distress, panic, anxiety, and fear.” U.S. District Judge Emily Marks initially upheld the method as constitutional, but the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later overturned that decision and ordered the district court to consider Lee’s request to be executed by firing squad instead.

The case remains active because Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall appealed the ruling. The matter could most likely move on to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has previously allowed nitrogen executions to go forward after last-minute appeals. Alabama’s primary execution method remains lethal injection, but the state last carried one out in April 2025 and has faced drug-sourcing problems in recent years.

Lee’s underlying conviction dates to the December 12, 1998 robbery of Jimmy’s Pawn Shop in Orrville, Dallas County, where Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson were shot and killed. State appellate courts upheld both the capital murder conviction and the death sentence, leaving the execution-method fight as the final barrier before Alabama could move ahead.