Atrocity After Atrocity in Alabama

On February 6, Alabama tortured Demetrius Frazier to death. It was the fourth time the state has used what I’ve coined its “gruesome and gasping nitrogen-gassings” to dispatch a condemned man.

In plain language, Ivanka Hrynkiw, who dutifully witnessed the execution for local media outlet al.com, catalogued the barbarity and horror of Frazier’s over 25-minute-long execution.

After recounting Frazier’s last words—“Let’s go”—Hrynkiw wrote that “a guard in the execution chamber checked the seal on the gas mask” (this would have been the execution captain, and therefore despite temporarily interrupting my flow, it seems an appropriate time for me to query whether you’ve ever read my July 2024 essay published in The Times of Israel called: “How much do you know about Alabama’s execution captain for nitrogen-gassings?”).

Hrynkiw continued her observations at length which I’ll reprint here because everyone—everyone in the civilized world who cares at all about human rights—should know about them:

“About 6:11 p.m., Frazier started waving his hands in circles towards his body. About a minute later his hands stopped moving. At approximately 6:12 p.m. Frazier clenched his face, and his nostrils flared, while his hands quivered. He appeared to say something, which was inaudible to the three witness rooms. His legs slightly lifted up off the gurney and he gasped. Then, his head rolled to the right side. Frazier exhibited sporadic gasping and shallow breathing until about 6:20 pm. The curtains closed at 6:29 pm, and his time of death declared seven minutes later at 6:36 p.m.”

Here are some questions I have that I hope you share when appraising this ghastly description of a poor Black man’s torturous execution in Alabama by gassing—one which followed the equally abominable gassings, last year, in Alabama, of three equally poor white men before him: Where the hell are the leaders and defenders of human rights in this country and around the world? How can repetitive palpably torturous executions by nitrogen-gassing not draw publicly expressed worldwide outrage and condemnation?

Is there anyone—anyone other than unconscionable federal judges, Alabama’s governor, Alabama’s attorney general, shady hired “experts,” and Alabama’s beleaguered Department of Corrections (DOC)—still insisting, using slippery terms like “agonal breathing,” to explain how an unconscious, insensate person would exhibit the movements Frazier did—the violent writhing, convulsing, and the gasping that all four men Alabama has gassed to death have shown? With the noted exceptions aside, is there anyone unfamiliar with the essay I co-authored—over a year ago—with Dr. Joel Zivot, a practicing physician in anesthesiology and intensive care medicine at Emory University: “Alabama’s nitrogen gas execution[s] will be cruel and unusual punishment?”

What the hell happened during the last 7 minutes of this so-called “public execution” when, prematurely, according to Hrynkiw: “the curtains closed?” Was the show at that point—with Frazier’s head “rolled to the right side” paired with his “sporadic gasping and shallow breathing”—too much to bear such that some DOC official decided it was time to pull the curtains down on what the reporters could see—and quick? As I’ve observed before in a state constantly “ducking and dodging death penalty accountability,” one that perennially earns a “big fat ‘F’ in human rights,” nothing is seemingly beyond the pale when it comes to Alabama executions.

In “Stand up for what’s right: Abolishing the death penalty in Alabama and beyond,” an essay I co-authored with the aforementioned Dr. Zivot, I quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson. This time, however, I find it more apt to inject the wisdom of yet another great American thinker, Henry David Thoreau, into the public discussion about capital punishment and the responsibility that each good person bears to do something, anything, to abolish it in our time—and especially as it concerns Alabama’s foray into gassing flesh-and-blood human beings.

In his magnum opus, “Walden; or, Life in the Woods,” published in 1854, Thoreau observed: “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.”

We can, each of us, through our words and our actions, paint a picture of nitrogen-gassings as something base, something below us, something unquestionably un-American and unacceptable. If we do this—we who care about human rights—we can, by consciously wielding whatever power and resources we have at our disposal, put a stop to Alabama’s gassing-tortures before there’s a fifth one, a sixth one, a seventh—and so on. Morally we can do this. Morally, we must.