Alabama put Jeffery Lee to death by lethal injection Thursday evening for the 1998 murders of two people during a pawnshop robbery, three months after a federal judge blocked the state from executing him with nitrogen gas.
Lee, 49, was pronounced dead at 6:22 p.m. at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. It was the second execution carried out in Alabama this year and the 27th in the United States.
Lee was convicted in 2000 of killing Jimmy Ellis, the owner of Jimmy’s Pawn Shop in Orrville, and store employee Elaine Thompson, during a Dec. 12, 1998, robbery. A third employee survived by playing dead. That survivor testified Lee had entered the store earlier, asked to see wedding rings, and said he’d return once he got money from his grandmother. He came back with a sawed-off shotgun and shot all three employees before fleeing. The survivor called 911 after Lee left.
Ellis was known locally as a singer whose voice resembled Elvis Presley’s. He performed for a time as the masked singer “Orion” and was the subject of a 2015 documentary.
A jury said life. A judge said death.
The jury that convicted Lee voted 7-5 to recommend a sentence of life imprisonment. A judge overrode that recommendation and sentenced him to death anyway.
Alabama abolished judicial override in 2017, stripping judges of the power to overturn a jury’s sentencing decision in capital cases. The change was not made retroactive, so it did not apply to Lee.
Lee’s attorneys pressed this point in an unsuccessful clemency bid. Supporters held a rally outside the Alabama Capitol on Tuesday under the banner “HONOR THE JURY,” and gathered again Thursday night in a vigil outside the Governor’s Mansion.
“His death sentence rested solely on judicial override — an old law that Alabama has repealed. The State itself concluded this practice was wrong enough to abandon yet still put a man to death under it. That is a moral failure, not just a legal formality,” Lee’s attorneys said in a statement after the execution.
Gov. Kay Ivey declined to intervene. She said the case “underscores exactly why” the 2017 law did not apply to existing death sentences.
“In June, after Mr. Lee attempted to avoid his deserved death sentence, I reaffirmed my commitment that justice would ultimately be served. Tonight, that promise was fulfilled for his victims, Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson, as well as for their loved ones who have long-awaited his sentence to be carried out,” Ivey said.
Attorney General Steve Marshall said Thursday evening that “justice was finally served.”
A last-minute switch in execution method
Lee had originally been scheduled to die by nitrogen gas on June 11, but that execution was called off the same night after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to lift a judge’s ruling that Alabama’s nitrogen method violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The ruling was a setback for the state, which began using nitrogen gas in 2024.
The day after that ruling, the attorney general’s office moved to set a new execution date for Lee using lethal injection instead.
Lee’s attorneys objected. In 2016, Lee had sued to challenge Alabama’s lethal injection protocol. He dropped that suit in 2018 after the state agreed in writing that
