Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said it’s “unfortunate” that Alabama is set to execute a Detroit native sentenced for murder and rape.
Whitmer said that the impending execution of Demetrius Frazier is “out of her hands,” just hours before Alabama was scheduled to carry out the sentence. Frazier, a 52-year-old Detroit native, was set to face the death penalty for the 1991 rape and murder of 41-year-old Pauline Brown in Birmingham, Ala.
“It’s in the hands of [Gov.] Kay Ivey,” Whitmer told the reporters.
Frazier, then 19, was convicted of murdering Brown after he broke into her apartment, raped her at gunpoint, and fatally shot her. Prosecutors detailed that he demanded and received $80 from her, shot her in the head, and later returned to the apartment to search for more money and have a snack. His criminal record also includes the 1992 murder of 14-year-old Crystal Kendrick in Michigan, whom he tried to rape and then killed.
UPDATE: @GovWhitmer says Alabama’s execution this of a native Detroiter is out of her hands and that @onetoughnerd “unfortunately…sent him down there.”
Alabama is scheduled to execute Demetrius Frazier for a 1991 rape and murder in less than an hour.https://t.co/uTY6DqNhqq
— Chad Livengood (@ChadLivengood) February 6, 2025
With his execution set for 7 p.m. ET, the Alabama Department of Corrections confirmed this would mark the state’s first use of the death penalty this year and the third in the United States in 2025. This execution will also be notable as part of Alabama’s recent adoption of nitrogen gas as a method of execution.
In a court filing from January, the Michigan Attorney General’s office said that Michigan did not want Frazier’s return. “While Michigan takes no position on the imposition of the death penalty in this case, Michigan does not seek to return Frazier to a Michigan correctional facility,” state attorneys wrote.
Alabama conducted its first nitrogen gas execution as it executed Kenneth Smith, 58, in January 2024, shortly after the Supreme Court rejected efforts to halt the method. In his final words, Smith criticized the state’s execution process as “a step backwards.”
Frazier’s family had reached out to Whitmer and urged her to intervene and facilitate his transfer back to Michigan, where he could serve a life sentence—a plea grounded in Michigan’s long-standing opposition to the death penalty, officially abolished there in 1847. Whitmer, however, pointed out the actions of her predecessor, former Republican Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, who authorized Frazier’s extradition to Alabama in 2011 and “unfortunately, had sent him down there.”
(Featured Image Media Credit:Screen Capture/MLive)
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