By Canadian Press

Alabama puts man to death for a 1991 murder in the nation’s 4th execution using nitrogen gas

Feb 6, 2025 | 6:51 PM

ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — An Alabama inmate convicted of murdering a woman after breaking into her apartment as she slept was put to death Thursday in the nation’s fourth execution using nitrogen gas.

Demetrius Frazier, 52, was pronounced dead at 6:36 p.m. CST at a south Alabama prison for his murder conviction in the 1991 rape and killing of 41-year-old Pauline Brown. It was the first execution in Alabama this year and the third in the U.S. in 2025, following a lethal injection Wednesday in Texas and another last Friday in South Carolina.

Prosecutors said that on Nov. 27, 1991, Frazier, then 19, broke into Brown’s apartment in Birmingham while she was asleep. Prosecutors said he demanded money and raped Brown at gunpoint after she gave him $80 from her purse. He then shot her in the head, they said, adding he returned later to have a snack and look for money.

Alabama became the first state to carry out executions with nitrogen gas when three inmates were put to death last year using the method. It involves placing a respirator gas mask over the person’s face to replace breathable air with pure nitrogen gas, causing death by lack of oxygen.

A federal judge last week rejected a request to block Frazier’s execution. His attorneys had argued the new method does not work as quickly as the state promised. Media witnesses, including The Associated Press, described how those put to death with the method shook on the gurney at the start of their executions.

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The judge, however, ruled that the descriptions of the executions did not support a finding that any of the men “experienced severe psychological pain or distress over and above what is inherent in any execution.”

Recently, Frazier’s mother and death penalty opponents had unsuccessfully urged Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to take Frazier back to Michigan, where he was serving a life sentence for the murder of a teenage girl before he was turned over to Alabama’s death row. Michigan does not have the death penalty.

Michigan attorney general’s office wrote in a January court filing that the state did not want Frazier back. It was in 1992 while in custody in Michigan that Frazier confessed to killing Brown, police had said.

Michigan’s Gov. Whitmer had told The Detroit News that her predecessor in office, Rick Snyder, “unfortunately” agreed to send Frazier to Alabama and in the hands of that state’s governor..

“It’s a really tough situation,” she said before the execution. “I understand the pleas and concerns. Michigan is not a death penalty state.”

Frazier was sentenced to life in prison in Michigan for the 1992 murder of Crystal Kendrick, 14. Then in 1996, an Alabama jury convicted him of murdering Brown and recommended by a vote of 10-2 that he receive a death sentence. All states but two — Alabama and Florida — now require a unanimous agreement for a death sentence.

Frazier remained in Michigan custody until 2011 when the then-governors of the two states agreed to move him to Alabama’s death row.

Kim Chandler, The Associated Press