ATMORE, Ala.—Jeffery Lee had thought long and hard about what makes us human.
After the death of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, Lee wrote about the topic in a piece called “Lost Humanity,” published by Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty, a nonprofit run by men condemned to die.
“When we ask ourselves the question of what makes us human, some part of the answer has to be the way we respond to the death of another human,” Lee wrote.
“We were all created equals, yet we may not have all grown up in equal environments. Some of us were more blessed to come from a background where family values nurtured our God given gifts and talents, while some never had the opportunity to fully embrace [them]. Whether we are a Supreme Court Justice or an Alabama death row inmate, we are all human and equal in the eyes of God.”
On Thursday, with the approval of the U.S. Supreme Court, the State of Alabama executed Jeffery Lee, known by his friends as J-Love, for the 1998 shooting deaths of Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson and attempted murder of Helen King.
The light blue curtain looking onto Alabama’s death chamber opened at 6:04.
Under rows of bare fluorescent lights, prison staffers had strapped Lee beneath a white sheet with IV lines entering the inside of both his arms.
Lee looked around at the witnesses. One of his attorneys reached out and touched the glass separating the death chamber from the witness chamber.
Around 6:06, Holman’s warden, wearing a black suit, read Lee’s death warrant and asked if he had any last words.
“All is well,” Lee said. “And I want to say to my family I love them. And to my brothers on life row, I love them.”
At 6:07, Lee balled his hands into fists and closed his eyes. He opened them again, licked his lips and began to breathe heavily.
Lee’s spiritual advisor approached him, placing his hand on Lee’s feet and praying.
Around 6:09, Lee briefly began breathing irregularly. His cheeks moved quickly, and he exhaled.
“All is well. And I want to say to my family I love them.
And to my brothers on life row, I love them.”
The spiritual advisor continued to pray as Lee’s breathing slowed.
At 6:10, the spiritual advisor stepped away, and a guard conducted a consciousness check, yelling Lee’s name. Lee did not respond.
The guard, wearing a checkered blue suit and brown dress shoes, pinched the inside of Lee’s arm. There was no response.
By 6:12, Lee was no longer visibly moving.
The curtain of the death chamber closed at 6:16.
After the execution, Lee’s legal team released a statement saying the state’s lethal injection of their client was “a moral failure, not just a legal formality.”
“Tonight, Alabama executed Jeffery Lee by lethal injection, even though his sentencing jury voted to spare his life,” the statement said. “His death sentence rested solely on judicial override — an old law that Alabama has repealed. The State itself concluded this practice was wrong enough to abandon yet still put a man to death under it.”
When Lee said he loved the men on Alabama’s life row, he meant it.
For years, Lee served as a leader in Project Hope. In that role, he mentored men new to the row and became a friendly face to those serving year after year inside Holman’s walls.
Before his execution, Project Hope’s Esther Brown asked the men incarcerated alongside Lee to write a few thoughts about their loved one, many of whom have known him for a decade or more.
Lee was soft spoken, one of the men wrote, and “eager to do something positive with his time here.”
“He has become a true leader among men and is universally liked and loved by the men of the row,” he wrote. “I have had the privilege to see him grow and bloom into a leader, advisor, example and brother, not to mention barber and huge Yankees fan, and many others are better human beings because of J-Love and just watching him just be who he is.”
Those around Lee said he was hopeful until the end, comforted by his belief that there was something beyond this life.
“God is not finished,” Lee was known for saying among those on the row.
In the days before he was moved to isolation ahead of Thursday’s lethal injection, the men on the row said Lee couldn’t stop singing.
“I trust in God, my Savior,” he would sing, the other men joining when they could. “The one who will never fail. He will never fail.”
Lee held onto hope for all of the nearly three decades he spent behind bars in Alabama.
“We need to continue to allow our hope in living a life outside of these prison walls to burn inside of us so our dream of being free continues to be a possibility,” Lee once wrote, quoting I Corinthians 2:9: “But as it is written, eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of a man the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.”
Even at the time he wrote those words, Lee didn’t have a meaningful path to freedom. Still, he dreamed.
“We need to start expecting to see the unexpected whether you have faith in God or not, because the rain falls on the just and the unjust,” Lee wrote. “So expect the unexpected and be on the lookout for God to do everything you don’t expect him to do.”
Despite all evidence to the contrary, and even in the wake of their loved ones’ execution, Lee’s brothers inside Holman prison are trying to follow Lee’s advice and keep hope. They have no choice.
The men on the row were moved when they heard Lee had used his last words to express his love for them.
Lee had always written about love, they remembered.
“To me love is a sentiment not able to be characterized or described with words,” he once wrote. “Love just is, and always will be.”
The day of Lee’s execution, love bugs, a summer staple in the south, had descended on Holman. The prison guards swatted them again and again without real success, their slow black bodies swarming the thick humid air.
Those living on the row said the bugs were there for a reason—for J-Love.
It was a fitting tribute, they said. Lee loved the men on the row, they knew. He had used his last breath to tell them so.
And there was no doubt: “We love him too.”
This makes me so sad.
Powerful reporting, Lee. Thank you for your witness.