The State of Alabama plans to execute Demetrius Frazier by nitrogen suffocation on Thursday despite serious questions about the reliability of his death sentence.
Demetrius Frazier, now 52, was charged with capital murder in the shooting of a Birmingham woman in 1996, when he was a teenager.
Too poor to hire a defense attorney, he was appointed lawyers who met with him only a few times before his capital trial. According to court filings, Mr. Frazier told the court his lawyers were not prepared for trial and not committed to challenging the State’s case.
At the time of Mr. Frazier’s trial, Alabama law capped his lawyers’ compensation at $1,000 for out-of-court trial preparation for each phase of the capital trial, based on a $20 per hour rate. So the most his lawyers could have been paid to represent him was $2,000.
The appointed lawyers did not call a single defense witness at trial. At the guilt/innocence phase, they conceded Mr. Frazier was guilty, admitting to the jury that “he was looking for somebody to rob.”
In addition, during closing arguments, the prosecutor made explicit comments about race that created the risk that Mr. Frazier, a Black man, was subjected to a race-conscious sentencing verdict in this case.
At the penalty phase, which lasted just 45 minutes, Mr. Frazier’s attorneys called no witnesses and presented no evidence about his life history or background—except that he was 19 at the time of the crime. In closing argument, defense counsel told the jury:
You haven’t seen any of his family out here basically because there is none. And we can’t offer you any background, because he has no background.
Even so, two jurors voted for life without parole, leaving only the bare minimum number of jurors voting for the death penalty. Under Alabama law, the jury could not have returned a death verdict if just one more juror believed Demetrius Frazier should not be condemned to death.
A “Tragic, Violent, and Deprived” Childhood
A wealth of mitigating evidence supported a life sentence for Mr. Frazier, but because his lawyers did not investigate or present it in court, neither the jury nor the judge deciding his sentence ever heard it.
Contrary to his attorney’s argument, Demetrius Frazier had a large family. According to court filings, his mother, three siblings, and two uncles were available and willing to testify on his behalf at trial, but his lawyers never contacted them.
And Mr. Frazier did, in fact, have a background—one filled with tragedy, violence, and deprivation—that would have humanized him for the jury.
Demetrius Frazier was abandoned by his father and was raised by his teenaged mother and her dysfunctional family in an impoverished and violent area of Detroit, Michigan, according to court filings. The family could not afford a safe and stable home, so they continually moved from place to place, often without heat or hot water and vulnerable to frequent break-ins.
Demetrius struggled developmentally and often failed to meet age-appropriate milestones. When he started walking, he often walked into walls. At six, a psychological evaluation revealed his mental age was significantly below average. In first grade, he could not identify colors, numbers, or letters of the alphabet, did not speak in sentences, and his words were slurred.
After trial, new lawyers gathered evidence that Mr. Frazier suffers from serious mental illness and limited intellectual functioning. They described in court filings that, before and during trial, he was in a constant state of emotional distress, and had bizarre and irrational outbursts while in the presence of the jury.
New counsel argued that Mr. Frazier’s trial lawyers were constitutionally ineffective because they failed to investigate and present evidence at the penalty phase.
The Constitution requires lawyers representing a person facing the death penalty to gather records, interview family and friends, and obtain expert evaluations in preparation for a capital trial. In many cases like Mr. Frazier’s, where appointed lawyers completely failed to investigate their client’s background, state and federal courts have held the client was denied their constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel.
But after new lawyers for Mr. Frazier filed an extensive postconviction petition detailing his trial counsel’s poor performance, the state trial court merely signed an order written by the prosecutor that denied Mr. Frazier’s petition—without hearing the mitigating evidence that should have been presented at trial.
Federal courts decided that—even though he had to convince only one more juror—the voluminous evidence about Mr. Frazier’s “tragic, violent, and deprived” background would not have made a difference.
Alabama’s Outlier Death Penalty
There is no death penalty in Mr. Frazier’s home state—Michigan’s state constitution banned capital punishment in 1963. And nearly every other state would have barred the death penalty for Mr. Frazier without a unanimous jury verdict for death.
At the time of Mr. Frazier’s trial in 1996, Alabama allowed trial judges to impose the death penalty not only in cases with non-unanimous jury votes for death, but even where all 12 jurors voted for life.
Florida and Delaware also had judge override statutes at the time, but Alabama is the only state where judges routinely overrode jury verdicts of life to impose death sentences. Since 1976, Alabama judges have overridden jury life verdicts over one hundred times.
Alabama ended judicial override in 2017, but it remains an outlier. Until Florida changed its law in 2023, Alabama was the only state that allowed a person to be condemned to death without a unanimous jury vote.