The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked Alabama from using nitrogen gas to execute a convicted murderer.

The high court rejected a last-minute appeal by state officials after lower-court judges ruled the execution method was “likely unconstitutional” in this case.

More from The New York Times:

The Supreme Court’s decision was unsigned and included no reasoning, which is typical in such emergency rulings. Dissent came from three of the court’s conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch.

The decision was a significant setback for Alabama officials, who planned to execute the condemned man, Jeffery Lee, 49, at 6 p.m. on Thursday. It also potentially sets the stage for a broader legal battle over the constitutionality of the execution method known as nitrogen hypoxia. Alabama became the first state to use it in 2024.

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If the execution had gone forward as scheduled, Mr. Lee would have been the eighth condemned inmate in Alabama — and the ninth in the country — put to death using the method.

It is highly unusual for the Supreme Court to stop an execution at the last minute. Typically, the court receives emergency requests to stop executions directly from prisoners. In this case, however, a federal appeals court blocked Mr. Lee’s execution, and Alabama had asked the Supreme Court to overrule that decision.

“Lee was convicted of the 1998 robbery and murders of a pawn shop owner and employee. The jury at Lee’s trial recommended, by a vote of 7-5, to sentence him to life in prison without the possibility of parole, but the judge at Lee’s trial overrode that recommendation and sentenced Lee to death,” SCOTUSblog wrote.

SCOTUSblog explained further:

Lee filed his challenge to the state’s use of nitrogen hypoxia last year. U.S. District Judge Emily Marks initially rejected his Eighth Amendment claim, writing that any discomfort from the use of nitrogen hypoxia does not violate the amendment. She suggested that “executions presume a risk of some pain.”

On June 8, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit reversed Marks’ decision and sent the case back for her to take another look. It reasoned that “[t]here is … a substantial risk of serious harm” from nitrogen hypoxia because the use of that method, based on findings by the district court, will lead to “one to three minutes of ‘severe air hunger and corresponding emotional distress, anxiety, physiological stress, and physical discomfort.’” “Such suffering,” the court of appeals concluded, “is over and above the mental distress that typically accompanies the knowledge of impending death by execution.”

One day later, the district court determined that a firing squad, which Lee proposed as an alternative execution method, would be a safer alternative to nitrogen hypoxia because it produces a painless death. Marks prohibited the state from using nitrogen hypoxia to execute Lee, and the court of appeals declined to put that decision on hold.

Alabama came to the Supreme Court shortly thereafter, asking the justices to intervene. Bowdre argued that allowing the lower courts’ decisions to stand “would be unprecedented in American history. Not only does it portend the first-ever permanent ban on a legislatively enacted method” of execution, “but it would expand the concept of cruelty well beyond the bounds of the Eighth Amendment” by relying on the emotional distress that Lee alleges nitrogen hypoxia will cause.

 

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