The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked Alabama from executing a man using nitrogen hypoxia, a relatively new method of carrying out the death penalty that experts say causes “air hunger” and that a federal court ruled violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
As is often the case in emergency death penalty appeals, the majority did not explain its reasoning. Three conservative justices – Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch – said they would have granted Alabama’s request and allowed the execution to take place. They also did not explain their reasoning.
Jeffery Lee was convicted of capital murder for killing two people, Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson, while robbing a pawnshop in 1998 in Orrville, Alabama. A jury recommended life imprisonment, but the trial court overruled that decision and sentenced Lee to death.
The question for the Supreme Court was whether to throw out a decision from a federal district court this week that barred the state from executing Lee with nitrogen gas. That relatively new method is partly a response to pharmaceutical companies declining to allow their drugs to be used in lethal injections. Alabama has executed seven people using nitrogen-hypoxia.
