ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — Alabama officials called off the Thursday lethal injection of a man convicted in a 1999 workplace shooting because of time concerns and trouble accessing the inmate’s veins.

Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Hamm said prison officials called off the execution after they determined inmate Arthur Miller’s “veins could not be accessed in accordance with our protocol” before a midnight deadline to get the execution underway. Miller has been returned to his cell at the south Alabama prison, Hamm said.

The halt to the execution came three hours after a divided U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution to begin. The 5-4 decision lifted an injunction granted after Miller’s attorneys said the state lost his paperwork requesting his execution be carried out using nitrogen hypoxia, a method legally available to him but one never used before in the U.S.

Miller, 57, was convicted of killing three people in a 1999 workplace rampage, drawing the death sentence.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — A divided U.S. Supreme Court said Alabama can proceed Thursday night with the lethal injection of an inmate convicted in a 1999 workplace shooting, vacating two lower court rulings that sided with the condemned man and his request for a different method of execution.

The 5-4 decision reversed rulings by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and a federal judge that the lethal injection could not go forward after Alan Miller’s attorneys said the state lost his paperwork requesting his execution be carried out using nitrogen hypoxia, a method legally available to him but one never used before in the U.S.

Miller, 57, was convicted of killing three people in a 1999 workplace rampage, drawing the death sentence. A judge blocked the state’s execution plan earlier this week.

Miller testified that he had turned in paperwork four years ago selecting nitrogen hypoxia as his execution method, putting it in a slot in his cell door at the Holman Correctional Facility for a prison worker to collect.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr. issued a preliminary injunction blocking the state from killing Miller by any means other than nitrogen hypoxia, after finding it was “substantially likely” that Miller “submitted a timely election form even though the State says that it does not have any physical record of a form.”

Thursday night’s Supreme Court ruling vacated…