A jury in Alabama heard harrowing testimony about a bungled pawnshop robbery in 1998 that quickly turned to bloodshed: Jeffery Lee, 21, charged in with a sawed-off shotgun and opened fire. The store’s owner, hit in the chest and arm, and his ex-wife, who was shot point-blank in the face, were killed. A clerk was wounded; she played dead until Mr. Lee fled.
Jurors voted unanimously to convict him. But when it came to deciding whether Mr. Lee should be put to death, most of the panel opted instead to sentence him to life in prison without parole.
And yet, nearly three decades later, Mr. Lee is on death row, his execution just days away.
Mr. Lee’s case is a relic of an era when judges had the power to override a jury’s sentencing decision, a practice forbidden in Alabama since 2017. He is one of more than two dozen inmates whose death sentences came from judges, not juries.
“We’re still here,” said Mr. Lee, now 49, speaking by phone from death row in Atmore, Ala. “The guys are still here fighting for their lives.”
I have reported on Mr. Lee’s case since the spring, when his legal team succeeded in raising doubts about the constitutionality of nitrogen gas as an execution method. Alabama was ready to put Mr. Lee to death using the gas in June, and had already moved him to the death chamber, when the U.S. Supreme Court intervened.
Mr. Lee agreed to an interview this month after the state rescheduled his execution for Sept. 17, this time using lethal injection.
His case has tangled with some of the most fraught questions hanging over capital punishment in Alabama. In the interview, he discussed how such a sprawling and philosophical debate in society — about the morality of the death penalty and the constitutional boundaries of cruel and unusual punishment — had such direct implications on his fate.
Now that he faces a grim countdown, Mr. Lee talked about what distracted him (blasting worship music) and brought some comfort (Bible verses like Psalm 91). He also focused his frustration on how his sentence was reached, saying that his crimes merited a severe punishment, but that it should be the punishment the jury agreed to.
“I’m not free — that’s punishment,” Mr. Lee said. “And that’s something I’ve been living with for the past 26 years. No way, not one day has been easy.”
Officials in Alabama — which has long had the highest number of death sentences per capita in the country — have resolved to push ahead with executions, even as they wrestle with the legacy of old flawed policies and as limited access to lethal injection drugs has prompted a search for new methods.
And in Mr. Lee’s case, those officials have defended the death sentence as just. “There is absolutely no question as to his guilt,” Steve Marshall, Alabama’s Republican attorney general, said in a statement. “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.”
Still, prominent legal and political figures in Alabama — including some Republicans who are generally supportive of the death penalty — have demanded clemency for Mr. Lee.
Alabama had been the last state to allow judges to override a jury’s sentencing decision before it changed the law with overwhelming bipartisan support in 2017. At some points, one-fifth of the inmates on death row had been sent there using judicial override. Legislative efforts to apply the change retroactively have failed, creating what critics regard as an alarming imbalance.
“When a state concludes that a sentencing practice was unjust — unjust enough to abolish by statute — it ought to reckon with the sentences that practice produced,” Drayton Nabers Jr., a former chief justice of the State Supreme Court and a Republican, wrote in an essay published in June in newspapers across the state.
During the sentencing phase of Mr. Lee’s trial in 2000, his family members testified about his struggles with substance abuse starting from a young age, which precipitated erratic and troubling behavior.
The victim’s relatives and others described the anguish unleashed in Dallas County, a rural and impoverished stretch west of Montgomery, part of a region known as Alabama’s Black Belt primarily for its rich soil.
Helen King, the clerk and surviving victim, shared the torment that had endured long after she called for help. “I still can’t sleep at night, I slap at my kids for no reason,” Ms. King said during the sentencing hearing. “It turned my life upside down.”
Efforts this week to reach Ms. King and relatives of Jimmy Ellis, the store owner, and Elaine Thompson, his ex-wife, were unsuccessful.
Mr. Lee was originally sentenced to die by electrocution, long the state’s primary method before lethal injection supplanted it in 2002. In 2018, as major pharmaceutical companies restricted the sale of the drugs used in lethal injections, Alabama legalized nitrogen hypoxia. The state paused executions for three months in 2022 after botched lethal injection attempts.
Mr. Lee agreed to be executed by nitrogen hypoxia, in which a person breathes pure nitrogen through a mask. Supporters of the method had presented it as efficient and potentially painless.
“We were led to believe that it would be something constitutional, something that wouldn’t involve suffering,” Mr. Lee said of why he chose nitrogen gas.
But after Alabama put the method in place in 2024, witnesses described seeing inmates writhing and gasping for air for 10 minutes or longer.
In a legal challenge to nitrogen hypoxia, Mr. Lee suggested being put to death by a firing squad would be quicker and less cruel. A federal judge agreed. Four .30-caliber bullets aimed at his heart, the judge wrote, “significantly reduces a substantial risk of severe pain.”
Alabama officials countered that the state did not have the legislative approval or the protocol prepared for a firing squad, much less “five expert marksmen willing and able to serve as executioners.”
Mr. Lee’s legal team contends that his agreement to be executed using nitrogen gas included language that prevented him from being put to death by lethal injection. The same federal judge rejected that argument in July.
Since June, Mr. Lee said, he has been caught between relief, as the day he believed could be his last turned out not to be, and dread, as he realizes a last-minute intervention is less likely this time around. He tries not to think about it.
Instead, Mr. Lee, who trained as a minister in prison, said he was leaning once again on the faith that had carried him throughout his time on death row.
“When I stop and choose to focus on what’s going on, I get stuck there,” he said. “I choose each and every day to wake up and not be fearful and afraid.”
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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