BOSTON (AP) — A jury Thursday convicted the brother of Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell of sexually assaulting women while he posed as a rideshare driver.
Jurors found Alvin Campbell, 45, guilty of 21 out of 22 counts for sex assaults from 2017 to 2019, the Suffolk County district attorney's office said. He was found guilty of charges including aggravated rape, kidnapping and photographing an unsuspecting nude person.
The jury was deadlocked on one of the rape charges.
“We will determine our action, if any, at a future date on that charge,” the district attorney's office said in a statement.
Campbell faces up to life in prison for aggravated rape when he is sentenced on June 29.
Campbell posed as a rideshare driver to target women outside bars or other locations, prosecutors said.
His younger sister became the first woman of color to win statewide office in Massachusetts when she was sworn in as attorney general in 2023. A spokesperson for the attorney general's office didn't immediately return an email from The Associated Press late Thursday seeking comment on the verdict.
Andrea Campbell has spoken previously about her family's troubled history in the criminal justice system, including her brother's rape charges.
“One thing I do frequently is share my story because I think there are so many who carry their story with a sense of shame and don’t want to talk about it, including the criminal aspects of my family,” she said in a previous interview with the AP. “But there is no shame in one sharing their story. There is power in it.”
The attorney general is the chief lawyer and law enforcement officer in the state.
After the verdict, Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden told reporters he hadn't spoken with the attorney general.
Alvin Campbell “deceivingly and calculatedly” preyed upon women in their most vulnerable moments, Hayden said. “I can't imagine what that horror must have been like for them.”
Campbell's defense attorney didn't immediately respond to a phone message and email from the AP.
Hayden expressed gratitude to the women who testified: “We’re happy that we were able to secure justice and accountability for them and so we thank them.”
FILE- Alvin Campbell Jr. sits at the defense table during his sexual assault trial, in Suffolk Superior Court, in Boston, May 18, 2026. (Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe via AP, Pool, File)
ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — An Alabama man facing the death penalty by nitrogen gas was spared Thursday as the U.S. Supreme Court refused to set aside a lower-court ruling that found the method is unconstitutionally cruel, issuing a brief order that came well after the hour originally planned to initiate Jeffery Lee’s execution.
The justices decided not to lift an injunction blocking Alabama from carrying out what would have been the nation’s ninth execution by nitrogen gas, rejecting a last-minute legal battle by the state as it sought to carry out the sentence in the evening. A spokesperson for the Alabama Department of Corrections said the execution was off for the evening and the state would not try another method.
The high court voted 6-3 and did not explain its reasoning. Three of the conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch — said they would grant Alabama’s request to lift the injunction and let the execution go forward.
“While I am disappointed the Supreme Court did not allow the state to proceed with Lee’s chosen method of execution, I remain committed to ensuring that justice is ultimately served for his victims,” Gov. Kay Ivey said.
In a statement the legal team for Lee, 49, hailed the decision and noted that his jury had voted for a sentence of life, which a judge overruled.
“His jury voted for life. Two courts ruled the method unconstitutional. Today, the Constitution prevailed,” the statement said. “Now Governor Ivey can finish what the jury started: restore the jury’s verdict of life without parole.”
The ruling was at least a temporary, rare victory for opponents of capital punishment in a state that has had one of the busiest death chambers in the country. And it capped an extraordinary legal back-and-forth over the humaneness of nitrogen gas as an execution method.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall promised the victims’ families that authorities will continue to seek justice, saying in a statement: “The State is prepared to do whatever is necessary to see Mr. Lee’s lawful sentence carried out.”
Lee filed a lawsuit challenging Alabama’s protocol as a violation of the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment, and U.S. District Judge Emily Marks ruled the method constitutional in May.
But a three-judge panel from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed her decision Monday, saying the three minutes it could take for an inmate to lose awareness is an “intolerable” time frame “given the suffering that would likely take place under Alabama’s nitrogen hypoxia protocol.”
Marks reevaluated the case and ruled again Tuesday saying Lee had shown “that the protocol constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment.” The state appealed to the Supreme Court.
“If that ruling stands, it would be unprecedented in American history. Not only does it portend the first-ever permanent ban on a legislatively enacted method, but it would expand the concept of cruelty well beyond the bounds of the Eighth Amendment,” lawyers with the Alabama Attorney General’s Office wrote.
Lee’s lawyers asked the high court to keep the execution on hold, saying in a response that Alabama was asking it to intervene at the eleventh hour “to allow an execution that has been found unconstitutional to proceed.”
Prison officials said Lee did not request a final meal Thursday but had potato chips, Skittles, water and a Sprite in the hours ahead of his possible execution.
The decision blocks Lee's execution in the immediate future, but it is unclear how long the reprieve will last. The state maintains that nitrogen is constitutional, and the lower-court order blocks only that method and other means of execution such as lethal injection and the electric chair, both of which are authorized in Alabama.
Alabama began using nitrogen gas to carry out some executions in 2024. The method involves strapping a respirator to a person’s face and replacing breathable air with pure nitrogen gas, causing death from lack of oxygen.
Nitrogen has been used in eight executions in the United States — seven times in Alabama and once in Louisiana. Lee was scheduled to be the ninth.
During the previous Alabama nitrogen executions, the inmates shook, pulled at the restraints and exhibited labored breathing. During the state’s last execution by nitrogen gas, 30 minutes elapsed between Anthony Boyd exhibiting signs of being impacted by the gas and state officials closing the curtain to the viewing room to signal the execution was complete.
The state has maintained that the method is constitutional and causes no more suffering than other execution methods.
Lee, who is currently housed at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, was convicted of two counts of capital murder for killing Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson while robbing a pawnshop on Dec. 12, 1998.
Prosecutors said Lee entered Jimmy’s Pawnshop with a sawed-off shotgun and shot Ellis, the owner, and Thompson, an employee.
A jury voted 7-5 to give Lee a sentence of life imprisonment. However a judge overrode that and sentenced him to death.
Alabama ended the practice of judicial override in 2017 and no longer allows a judge to disregard a jury’s sentencing decision in death penalty cases.
Bestselling author John Grisham called on Gov. Ivey to honor the jury's decision and commute Lee's sentence to life without parole.
“The practice of a judge overriding a jury was declared unconstitutional and so indefensible that Alabama itself abolished it in 2017,” Grisham said in a statement. “Jeffery Lee’s jury made its decision, the Alabama Legislature later agreed that juries, not judges, should decide life or death sentences.”
Marshall, the attorney general, said: “Tonight’s ruling is a miscarriage of justice, not for us, but for Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson, who Jeffery Lee brutally and senselessly murdered and left on the floor of their place of business. Tonight I am also keeping their families in mind, many of whom were prepared to witness the final act of justice be served.”
This undated photo provided by the Alabama Department of Corrections on Thursday, June 11, 2026, shows Jeffery Lee, who was sentenced to death for killing two people during a 1998 robbery at a pawn shop. (Alabama Department of Corrections via AP)
Protesters gather outside the Capitol in Montgomery, Ala., on Monday, June 8, 2026, to oppose an upcoming execution in Alabama. (AP Photo/Kim Chandler)
This undated photo from the Alabama Department of Corrections shows Jeffery Lee, who was sentenced to death for killing two people during a 1998 robbery at a pawn shop. (Alabama Department of Corrections via AP)
Abraham Bonowitz, of the group Death Penalty Action, leads a demonstration outside the Capitol in Montgomery, Ala., on Monday, June 8, 2026, to oppose an upcoming execution in Alabama. (AP Photo/Kim Chandler)
