USA: Steven Nelson in Texas and Demetrius Frazier in Alabama were executed

Two death sentences were carried out in the USA within just 24 hours – Steven Nelson was executed in Texas and Demetrius Frazier in Alabama.

Texas

On Wednesday evening, 37-year-old Steven Nelson was executed with a lethal injection, an overdose of pentobarbital, in the US state of Texas. He was sentenced to death for the murder of a young pastor in the Dallas area in 2011 during the course of a robbery.

Nelson himself did not deny being involved in the robbery, but did deny the murder. He was merely a lookout, while two accomplices were responsible for the murder.

Robert Dunham of the Death Penalty Policy Project, former director of the Death Penalty Information Center, stated in his assessment that Nelson did not commit the murder, did not intend it and knew nothing about it. But under the Texas “law of parties”, anyone involved in a crime can be sentenced to death.

However, the men Nelson identified as accomplices were not held accountable for the crime – they had alibis that were not further investigated.

As Robert Dunham further explained, Steven Nelson’s case was also one of those in which the jury was racially instructed that there was an increased risk of recidivism because Nelson was black.

According to media reports, the Christian church congregation where the victim was a pastor did not distance itself from the death penalty for the perpetrator, but instead supported it.

Alabama

On Thursday evening, 52-year-old Demetrius Frazier was executed in the US state of Alabama. Nitrogen hypoxia was used for the fourth time. This means that the prisoner breathes in pure nitrogen through a mask so that he dies from a lack of oxygen.

Frazier was sentenced to death for assaulting, raping and murdering a 41-year-old woman in 1991. Some time later, he was already serving a life sentence in prison in the US state of Michigan when he confessed to the murder committed in Alabama.

After he was sentenced to death there, he was brought back to Michigan because he had to serve his sentence there first. However, in 2011, the then governor of Michigan made the decision to return Demetrius Frazier to Alabama – legal experts say he should not have done so, and in fact Frazier continued to be held as a prisoner in Michigan custody.

Frazier’s attorney, along with his mother and numerous activists, reached out to the current governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, to urge her to correct her predecessor’s mistake and bring Frazier back to Michigan. It would have prevented his execution, as Michigan has not had a death penalty since the mid-19th century.

But Whitmer did not speak out until the day of Frazier’s execution, when she publicly declared that it was out of her hands. Not only Frazier himself in his last words, but also many of his supporters were deeply disappointed in Gretchen Whitmer.

Sources:
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/02/05/steven-nelson-executed-texas-clint-dobson/78228878007/
https://apnews.com/article/alabama-execution-demetrius-frazier-nitrogen-gas-e1b391e1e157f2815be1baa248737778