Alabama set to execute Jeffery Lee by lethal injection Thursday
Jeffery Lee is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection Thursday at 6 p.m. at south Alabama’s William C. Holman Correctional Facility. The execution comes three months after a judge blocked the state from putting him to death by nitrogen gas.
Lee, 49, was convicted of capital murder in the Dec. 12, 1998, shooting deaths of Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson during a robbery at Jimmy’s Pawn Shop in Orrville, a small town west of Selma. A third employee survived by playing dead.
The surviving employee testified that Lee entered the store, asked to see wedding rings and said he would be back after getting money from his grandmother, according to the source. Lee returned with a sawed-off shotgun and shot Ellis, Thompson and the other employee. The survivor called 911 after Lee left.
Ellis, the store’s owner, was a singer whose voice resembled Elvis Presley’s and who performed as the masked singer “Orion.”
The jury that convicted Lee voted 7-5 to recommend a sentence of life without parole, but the trial judge overrode them and sentenced him to death. Alabama abolished judicial override in 2017, but the law was not retroactive.
Supporters of Lee’s clemency bid held a rally Tuesday outside the Alabama Capitol under the banner “HONOR THE JURY.”
Alabama initially sought to execute Lee on June 11 using nitrogen gas. After a judge stopped that plan, the state attorney general’s office filed paperwork seeking the new execution date by lethal injection.
Lee’s attorneys have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution. They argued the state is bound by a 2018 agreement in which Lee dismissed a challenge to the state’s lethal injection protocol after the state agreed to execute him by nitrogen hypoxia. His lawyers said the state could revise its nitrogen protocol to make it constitutional or use a firing squad.
“The petition asks this Court to determine whether the State may execute Mr. Lee by lethal injection notwithstanding its prior representation that it would execute him by nitrogen hypoxia,” his attorney wrote in a filing with the high court.
The attorney general’s office asked the court to let the execution proceed.
“An unpunished murder is an intrinsic and ongoing harm to those interests and to the rule of law. Nearly twenty-eight years is decades too long,” lawyers with the attorney general’s office wrote.
Lethal injection remains Alabama’s primary execution method. The state began carrying out some executions using nitrogen gas in 2024. Nitrogen has now been used in seven executions in Alabama and one in Louisiana.
