Demetrius Terrell Frazier

Demetrius Frazier's execution on February 6, 2025 was the first of 2025 and the fourth in world history. Its constitutional weight came from geography as much as chemistry. Frazier was serving four life sentences in Michigan — an abolition state since 1846 — when Governors Robert Bentley (Alabama) and Rick Snyder (Michigan) approved an interstate custody transfer in 2011 that delivered him to Alabama's death row. Michigan had never before handed a person to another state to be executed.

His mother, Carol Frazier, spent the weeks before his execution publicly begging Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to invoke the transfer agreement and bring her son home. Whitmer did not act. The federal courts rejected both Frazier's Eighth Amendment challenge to nitrogen hypoxia and his separate claim that Michigan's original transfer had been unlawful. He was executed on the standard Alabama protocol; witnesses again reported sustained visible movement and gasping for the first several minutes of gas flow.

Frazier's death opened a second constitutional question that scholars, not the state, will have to answer: whether an abolition state's participation in interstate custody transfers to death-penalty states is itself a form of complicity that abolition was supposed to end.