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.

Background of the Case

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 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.

The method has drawn sharp criticism, and a federal appeals court in Atlanta concluded that the protocol presented “a substantial risk of serious harm — severe pain over and above death itself.” After that, a lower federal court concluded that the state could feasibly execute Lee with a firing squad, instead, and that method would significantly reduce the risk of harm.

Reaction to the Ruling

Alabama Republican Gov. Kay Ivey said in a statement following the ruling that while she was disappointed with the decision, “I remain committed to ensuring that justice is ultimately served for his victims.”

The Supreme Court often sides with the state in last-minute death penalty cases on the emergency docket. But the legal posture of Lee’s case was different because, unlike in most emergency matters, a federal district court had entered a ruling on the merits.

Original reporting: KRDO (Colorado Springs metro) — read the source article.