Leadership abdication and Alabama’s next execution

Demetrius Frazier, a poor Black man on Alabama’s death row, is scheduled to be tortured to death by being forced to breathe nitrogen gas through a bespoke gas mask on February 6th.

Understatedly, albeit soberly, The Associated Press wrote about Frazier’s impending execution: “Media witnesses, including the Associated Press, described how the [first three men executed by nitrogen-gassing] shook on the gurney for the first minutes of their execution, followed by what appeared to be several minutes of periodic labored breaths with long pauses in between.”

Relatedly, in a June 2021 essay I styled “Ghoulish pall is cast over America by Alabama’s plan to gas humans to death,” I advanced that “with the state-sanctioned gassing of flesh-and-blood human beings on the horizon, some potentially former clients of mine—and no real viable impediments in sight to stop it—it must be said that the good, moral people of Alabama, of which there are many, are losing their fight against those hell-bent on profaning the system.”

You see, a decade ago, when I worked as an assistant federal defender in Montgomery, Alabama, I was one of the lawyers assigned to Frazier’s case. At Holman prison, a place I once described as “hell on earth,” I sat across from Frazier breathing the same stale air, drinking the same soft drinks, and eating the same unhealthy snacks from the vending machines while talking about the facets of his case; this includes the heinous crimes he’s been convicted of and his “childhood”—one so rife with neglect, abuse, and crushing poverty it rivals the saddest of sad prison stories.

I worked long, long, long hours with other lawyers, investigators, and social workers, doing everything possible to try and spare Frazier the barbaric, state-induced gasping-and-gruesome conscious suffocation—the writhing, choking, convulsing on the gurney death—he now faces.

Additionally, since I retired from law practice, I’ve advocated through an avalanche of writings, many of them published in Alabama, to abolish the death penalty. And so you rightly probably think that I’m biased in my opinion Alabama shouldn’t gas-torture Demetrius Frazier to death.

However, here’s something else that I’m willing to bet on: I’m willing to bet that no matter how bad a man or woman’s crimes are, overwhelmingly, good, God-fearing people, when exposed to the truth of “nitrogen hypoxia”—without it being drowned out by official obfuscation and mob vengeance—will say that they don’t want the state, in this instance Alabama, to gas a human’s life away no different than killing a cockroach or reenacting the Nazi extermination of the Jews.

The problem we have—we who know any kind of state-killing is wrong, and especially a method where humans are gassed to death—is an abdication and a yawning vacuum of leadership. And I don’t just mean political leadership, though I do mean that, too, and did just publish a column recently in The Times of Israel, The Montgomery Advertiser, and USA Today about Biden’s failed death penalty legacy in Alabama. Biden, other national politicians, and all of Alabama’s state legislators surely will share blame in the historical accounting that will undoubtedly, one day, take place for all of Alabama’s repeated gassing tortures—with Frazier set to be the fourth in this abominable series.

I’m highlighting not just the leadership failures of the politically connected here, but also, the failures of all the other wealthy, famous, and influential voices nationally and in Alabama.

It makes for common decency for everyone—people from every social and economic stratum—to protest the torturous death of another American, no matter how reviled, especially understanding that no one has advocated for a person like Demetrius Frazier or any of the three men who have been gassed to death so far, to be set free; people of conscience are only insisting that they shouldn’t be—and they shouldn’t have been—tortured to death.

The necessary, all hands on deck public protest that is needed hasn’t happened. Very far from it. In fact, in January 2024, after Kenneth Smith became the first man Alabama tortured to death with nitrogen gas, I wrote that “our legal, political, moral, and cultural leaders in the United States have failed to meet the moment. Their muted, unconscionably insufficient outrage over Smith’s torture will never be forgotten.”

Fast-forward to this past September, when Alan Miller became the second man to be tortured by nitrogen gassing. Then I wrote: “Imagine a movie in which state executioners strap a man to a gurney and affix a do-it-yourself mask to his face—one crafted to kill by making the man breathe pure nitrogen gas. Then after the man flops around on the gurney like a fish out of water, tortured by having the oxygen slowly and painfully squeezed from his body, instead of abandoning the practice, the state executes more men in the same exact way, making it the ‘new normal.’”

Most recently, in November, after Carey Grayson became the third man Alabama gas-tortured to death, I demanded to know: “When will the noble, courageous citizens of Alabama come forward and say: enough!? Enough gassing. Enough killing.” As Demetrius Frazier’s execution date on February 6 evidences, the answer is: not fast enough.

But I repeat: “Make no mistake about it, this evil is not limited to Alabama. It blankets and sullies the rest of America too, especially when our leaders, as Americans, assert ourselves on the world stage as good moral actors—model defenders of humanity and human rights.”

Alabama’s continued use of nitrogen gas to torture human beings to death has to be stopped. Who will do it? But before that question can be answered: Who will speak out publicly against it first? Religious leaders, professional athletes, actors, big and small business owners, doctors, lawyers, farmers, teachers, students—everyone has a responsibility to get involved.