Alabama is scheduled to put Jeffery Lee to death by lethal injection this week at Holman Correctional Facility outside Atmore, three months after federal courts blocked the state from executing him with nitrogen gas and left prison officials to fall back on the method Alabama law treats as its default.
Gov. Kay Ivey has set a 30-hour window for the execution. It opens at 12 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 17, and expires at 6 a.m. Friday, Sept. 18. Barring further action by the courts or by the governor, the Alabama Department of Corrections will carry out the sentence at Holman, the prison in Escambia County that houses the state’s execution chamber.
Lee, now in his 28th year under a death sentence, was convicted of capital murder in the shotgun killings of two people inside a Dallas County pawnshop in December 1998. A jury that heard his case recommended he spend the rest of his life in prison. The trial judge rejected that recommendation and imposed death — a power Alabama judges held for decades and that the Legislature took away in 2017, but only for cases sentenced after that date.
A 30-Hour Window, Not a Single Hour
The structure of the execution order reflects a change Alabama made to its own procedures a few years ago. Until 2023, the Alabama Supreme Court set a specific execution date, and the state had a single 24-hour period in which to complete it. That constraint collided with a stretch of troubled lethal injection attempts in which corrections staff could not establish intravenous access before the clock ran out.
In December 2022, Ivey asked the Alabama Supreme Court to give the state more time. The court agreed the following month, amending Rule 8(d)(1) of the Alabama Rules of Appellate Procedure so that the court’s order authorizes the corrections commissioner to carry out the sentence within a time frame chosen by the governor rather than on a court-fixed calendar day. The order of the Alabama Supreme Court functions as the death warrant; the governor’s letter fixes the hours.
That is how a 30-hour window running from midnight Thursday to 6 a.m. Friday came to replace what would once have been a single scheduled date. Ivey retains the constitutional authority to grant a reprieve or a commutation at any point before the sentence is carried out.
What Happened at Jimmy’s Pawnshop
The crime that sent Lee to death row took place around midday on Dec. 12, 1998, in Orrville, a small town in Dallas County in Alabama’s Black Belt, roughly 15 miles west of Selma.
Court records describe Lee walking into Jimmy’s Pawnshop carrying a sawed-off shotgun and opening fire almost immediately. He shot Jimmy Ellis. He then shot Elaine Thompson in the face. He shot a third person, Helen King, and then shot Ellis a second time. Ellis and Thompson died of their wounds.
King survived by lying motionless on the floor and pretending to be dead. Lee tried and failed to take the store’s cash register and fled with two other people. A surveillance camera inside the pawnshop recorded the shootings. Lee was later captured at a motel in Georgia, where he confessed.
He was convicted of capital murder in the deaths of Ellis and Thompson and of attempted murder in the shooting of King.
The Jury Recommended Life. The Judge Overrode It.
At the sentencing phase, the jury recommended that Lee be sentenced to life in prison. The trial court overruled that recommendation and imposed a death sentence, adding a separate life sentence for the attempted murder of King.
That sequence was legal in Alabama at the time and, for many years, common. Under the state’s capital sentencing statute, a jury’s sentencing verdict was advisory. A recommendation of death required the votes of at least 10 of the 12 jurors; a recommendation of life required only a majority. Either way, the final sentencing decision belonged to the judge, who could impose death over a jury’s life recommendation. The practice, known as judicial override, was used well over a hundred times after the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, and Alabama was the last state where judges exercised it routinely.
The Legislature ended it in 2017. Ivey signed the bill that April, making a capital jury’s sentencing verdict binding on the trial court. But the change applied going forward. It was not made retroactive, and legislative attempts to extend it to people already sentenced under the old system have not succeeded — a House committee rejected one such bill in 2024. The result is that a number of men remain on Alabama’s death row under sentences that a jury declined to impose. Lee is among them.
Alabama also remains the only state that permits a capital jury to return a death verdict without being unanimous, requiring 10 of 12 votes.
Three Methods, and How an Inmate Chooses
Alabama law authorizes three methods of execution: lethal injection, electrocution and nitrogen hypoxia. Section 15-18-82.1 of the Code of Alabama makes lethal injection the default and gives a condemned person a one-time opportunity to elect one of the alternatives in writing, delivered to the warden. The election for electrocution must be made within 30 days of the Alabama Supreme Court affirming the conviction and sentence; a separate election period governed nitrogen hypoxia after that method was added, with a June 2018 effective date. If an execution warrant is already pending, the statute gives 48 hours after a new execution date is set to file the election.
If no election is made, the sentence is carried out by lethal injection. The statute also contains a fallback: if all three authorized methods were held unconstitutional, the corrections commissioner could select any constitutional method.
Alabama became the first state in the country to carry out an execution using nitrogen hypoxia in January 2024, and has used the method several times since. Firing squad, the method Lee asked for, is not among the three that Alabama law authorizes. Adding it would take an act of the Legislature.
The June Ruling That Stopped the Nitrogen Execution
Ivey had originally set a 30-hour window in June for Lee to be executed by nitrogen hypoxia. That did not happen.
U.S. District Judge Emily Marks of the Middle District of Alabama barred the state from using the method on Lee, holding that Alabama’s nitrogen hypoxia protocol violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Marks found that the protocol presented a substantial risk of serious harm — severe pain over and above death itself.
Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, a prisoner challenging a method of execution must clear two hurdles: show that the method carries a substantial risk of severe pain, and identify an alternative that is feasible, readily implemented and would significantly reduce that risk. Marks concluded Lee had done both. She found that execution by firing squad would be feasible for the state to accommodate and would significantly reduce the risk, notwithstanding that Alabama would have to authorize it by statute first.
The state appealed. A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to disturb the district court’s ruling, dividing 2-1. Alabama then went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied the state’s request on the night the June execution had been set to take place.
Because the injunction addressed the nitrogen protocol, it did not foreclose lethal injection. That is the method named in the current order.
Holman, and Why Escambia County Is Part of This Story
Holman Correctional Facility sits on Alabama 21 north of Atmore in Escambia County, a short drive from the Baldwin County line and well within the circulation area of South Alabama’s readers. It opened in 1969 and, for more than half a century, has been the site of Alabama’s executions.
The prison’s general population housing was largely closed in 2020 after years of deterioration and violence, but the facility continues to operate as the state’s execution site and as a hub for other correctional functions. On execution nights, Atmore — a city of roughly 8,000 people better known regionally for Poarch Creek tribal operations and its restored downtown — becomes a staging ground for media, victims’ families, defense teams and demonstrators.
For Escambia County, that is a recurring civic reality rather than an abstraction. Local law enforcement handles traffic and perimeter issues on the roads outside the prison, and county residents make up part of the facility’s workforce.
What Happens Next
Between now and midnight Thursday, several things can still change the outcome. Lee’s attorneys may file further challenges in federal court, including any addressed specifically to Alabama’s lethal injection procedures, and the state can respond. The 11th Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court can act on emergency applications at any hour, including during the execution window itself. Ivey can grant a reprieve or commute the sentence.
If none of that occurs, the Department of Corrections will carry out the sentence inside the window and the commissioner will report the outcome to the Alabama Supreme Court. If the window expires without the execution being completed, the state would have to return to the Alabama Supreme Court for a new authorization and the governor would have to set a new time frame.
South Alabama News will report the outcome.