A federal judge blocked Alabama from executing an inmate with nitrogen gas, ruling that the method violates the Eighth Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
U.S. District Judge for the Middle District of Alabama Emily Marks ordered that the state’s Department of Corrections is permanently enjoined from using nitrogen hypoxia execution. The order came as part of the plaintiff Jeffery Lee’s plea for a firing squad method of execution instead of nitrogen hypoxia after he was convicted on two counts of murder, which he committed while robbing a store.
Alabama is one of five states where execution by nitrogen gas is legal, alongside Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. Alabama was the first state to authorize its use, championing the capital punishment method and taking it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in the state’s favor in 2024.
Marks, who previously ruled against the use of nitrogen gas execution in the case, brought down the second opinion after an appeals court reversed her first decision.
“Lee has shown by a preponderance of the evidence that firing squad is feasible, readily implemented, and significantly reduces the substantial risk of serious harm posed by [nitrogen hypoxia protocol],” Marks wrote in her opinion.
Alabama currently uses nitrogen hypoxia, lethal injection, and electrocution as its main forms of capital punishment, but can resort to others “based on the sole discretion of the Commissioner of the Department of Corrections,” according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Lee had proposed firing squad as his method of execution, and the judge opined that the “proposed firing squad alternative significantly reduces a substantial risk of severe pain as compared to nitrogen hypoxia.”
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Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall appealed Marks’s ruling on Tuesday evening.
The case could force the Supreme Court to take a look at nitrogen hypoxia execution, which the high court has allowed to proceed in other cases.