MONTGOMERY, Ala. — On Wednesday, an Alabama prisoner was supposed to be the fourth person to be put to death with nitrogen gas. His lawyers asked a federal judge to stop the execution, saying that the first three prisoners had shown signs of suffocation as the gas ran.
Pauline Brown was killed and raped by Demetrius Terrence Frazier in 1991. He is set to be put to death on February 6. In a court statement on Wednesday, his lawyers asked the judge to stop the execution unless the state changes the rules, like giving him medicine to make him sleepy before the gas starts flowing. In the court filing, accounts from witnesses of the state’s first three nitrogen gas executions were used.
The number of nitrogen hypoxia executions is small (three). Still, the results are clear: Alabama’s method does not work the way defendants say it does and always leads to conscious suffocation, which is against the Eighth Amendment, Frazier’s lawyers wrote in the court document.
Alabama was the first state to use nitrogen gas to put someone to death last year. Last year, the new method was used to kill three prisoners. Putting a protective gas mask over the person’s face replaces the air they can breathe with pure nitrogen gas, which kills them by preventing them from getting oxygen.
Witnesses from the media, including The Associated Press, said that the men shook on the couch for the first few minutes of their execution. After that, they seemed to take several minutes of labored breaths with long breaks in between.
The office of the Alabama attorney general has not yet replied to the request to stop the execution. The state had already asked a federal judge to throw out Frazier’s lawsuit over the way of execution, saying that the prisoners’ movements did not show that they were in pain.
There are more likely reasons for his movements than just voluntary resistance or the involuntary movements that come with dying, which could be mistaken for signs of awareness or distress, the state’s lawyers wrote in a court filing on Christmas Eve.
Alabama’s main way of putting people to death is still by lethal injection.
Alabama became the third state to allow the use of nitrogen gas to kill criminals in 2018. The state of Alabama gave prisoners a short time to choose how they wanted to be executed. Frazier was one of the prisoners who chose nitrogen gas as their chosen way to be put to death, but the state had not yet come up with rules for how to use the gas for an execution.
Frazier was found guilty of killing Brown in her flat in Birmingham. prosecutors said Frazier admitted to raping and shooting Brown after taking about $80 from her purse while police in Detroit were holding him on a separate charge. Ten of the twelve jurors agreed that he should be put to death. A judge told him he would die.
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