Questions About Alabama’s Next Nitrogen-Gassing

During a 30-hour window starting June 11 and ending June 12, Jeffrey Lee is scheduled to be executed in Alabama by nitrogen-gassing or “nitrogen hypoxia” if you prefer that name; the bottom line is nitrogen gas will be pumped into Lee by gas mask until he dies. Since 2024, Alabama has executed seven men and Louisiana has executed one man by nitrogen-gassing.

These are some questions I ask you to consider about Alabama’s upcoming nitrogen-gassing of Mr. Lee:

• A jury recommended by a vote of 7 to 5 that Lee, who is Black, be imprisoned to life without the possibility of parole. But the trial judge, Jack Meigs, a white man, decided the jury got it wrong and sentenced Lee to death instead using a practice called “judicial override” which Alabama outlawed in 2017—the last state to eliminate the practice. Although Alabama got rid of judicial override years ago the change was not made retroactive to prisoners like Lee, allowing his death sentence to remain unchanged. In July 2011 the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) issued a report about judicial override that began: “No capital sentencing procedure in the United States has come under more criticism as unreliable, unpredictable, and arbitrary than the unique Alabama practice of permitting elected trial judges to override jury verdicts of life to impose capital punishment.” The EJI report also observed: “There is evidence that elected judges override jury life verdicts in cases involving white victims much more frequently than in cases involving victims who are black. Seventy-five percent of all death sentences imposed by override involve white victims, even though less than 35% of all homicide victims in Alabama are white.” In Lee’s case, the EJI report notes that the victims were white. (In another case where Judge Meigs overrode a life without the possibility of parole sentence in favor of death, the report notes both the defendant and victim were Black.) My question is: Did race impermissibly play a role—even if unconsciously—in Judge Meigs’s override decision in Lee’s case, and isn’t that possibility alone more than enough reason for Governor Kay Ivey to honor and respect the life without the possibility of parole sentence issued by a jury of Alabamians by granting Lee clemency? Shouldn’t Ivey be especially inclined to do so as she was the one who signed the legislation banning judicial override into law?
• On April 30, 2026, reporter Ralph Chapoco wrote in the Alabama Reflector that the “Alabama Department of Corrections, AG’s office face possible sanctions in death penalty case”—the case in question being Lee’s. Chapoco reported federal judge Emily Marks “ruled that former ADOC Commissioner John Hamm, Deputy Commissioner Charles Williams; Holman Correctional Warden Terry Raybon and Brenton L. Thompson of the AG’s office had falsely stated that it could not maintain data collected for pulse oximeters used to monitor inmates during nitrogen gas executions.” Lawyers, doctors, anti-death penalty advocates and others opposed to nitrogen-gas executions have—before, during, and after all the nitrogen-gassings Alabama has perpetrated so far—consistently argued the method is cruel and unusual because it causes minutes-long “conscious suffocation” as has been borne out by numerous eyewitness accounts. Before Lee is executed will the above-named Alabama officials face sanctions for lying in the federal court case Lee brought about the data collected by the state’s pulse oximeters—data which all along, if not destroyed and if made available, could further establish the torture of conscious suffocation experienced by all of the prisoners Alabama has thus far executed by nitrogen-gassing? Relatedly, what is Governor Ivey’s position on the false statements Judge Marks has identified and how can she allow Lee’s execution under the dark shadow they cast?
• On May 8, Managing Editor of “SCOTUSblog” Kelsey Dallas wrote that “a few” of the Supreme Court Justices “have serious questions about the constitutionality” of nitrogen-gassing executions; her blog post was titled: “Will the Supreme Court end nitrogen gas executions?” and it notes that Jeffrey Lee’s case could be the case where the Court outlaws the method. I share the question Dalllas’s blog post raises but I also think every day Americans need to make their voices heard in opposition to nitrogen-gassing in order to pressure the Court to be willing to act. At the end of March at an event at Notre Dame Law School, Anthony Ray Hinton who spent 30 years on Alabama’s death row before being exonerated said: “It is so important for all of us to look at the death penalty in this country and do something about it.” Building on Hinton’s plea, query: What are civilized Alabamians—and all conscientious Americans—doing to put a stop to nitrogen-gassings, including potentially Lee’s, as well as all executions everywhere—and isn’t it obvious more effort must be made?