What is it about the swaggering, sweltering heat of summer that stirs up so much bloodlust? By now it’s a platitude that murder and other violent crime rates rise when the weather gets hotter. And while there’s no time of year Alabama’s criminal justice and correctional systems don’t discriminate against Black people, recent years have demonstrated summertime is when Alabama especially seems to torture Black men with its racist capital punishment regime.
I wrote as much in my column “Alabama’s summer 2024 legal lynching” when I posited “it’s not officially summer in Alabama until a Black man’s been lynched — legally or illegally[.]” At the time I observed: “Alabama still has a despicable penchant for using a vestige of slavery — the death penalty — in the 21st century to subjugate and to disproportionately dehumanize its poor Black and brown condemned citizens, most of whom grew up in impoverished and hellacious homes very far from the kind of safe, stable, and suitably nurturing and loving environments many Alabama families take for granted.”
The name of that 2024 column was taken from an earlier essay I titled “Alabama’s summer 2022 legal lynching” concerning the execution of Joe Nathan James Jr.; in that 2022 piece I invoked “legendary Alabama lawyer [and Equal Justice Initiative Executive Director] Bryan Stevenson” who insists “[t]he death penalty’s roots are clearly linked to the legacy of lynching” and that “[w]e need to own up to the way racial bias and legalized racial subordination have compromised our ability to implement criminal justice.”
In that vein but perhaps more depressingly, more drearily, I expounded in the summer of 2023 in “Stopping Alabama’s addiction to torture” on how “Alabama’s addiction to torturing poor people — disproportionately Black and brown people — and more often than not, people who are severely mentally ill with inhumane correctional institutions, a dysfunctional parole system, and, in some cases, a secretive and sadistic lethal injection protocol, has been going on for so long, overwhelmingly, Alabamians and Americans are desensitized to it.”
More: Things to consider on Alabama’s next nitrogen gassing | STEPHEN COOPER
After James was tortured, in the piece “Fascism, racism, sexism and torture: Alabama’s last execution had it all,” I implored: “Investigations should be launched immediately, and not just into the sexist jackasses ogling the outfits of female reporters, but, also, into why Alabama keeps torturing to death poor, disproportionately Black men, most of whom were condemned — as famed death penalty attorney Stephen Bright long ago observed — because they had the worst lawyer, not because they committed the worst crime.”
Fast-forward to this summer with the looming execution of another poor Black man, Jeffrey Lee. Despite lingering questions about the inequity, immorality, and inhumanity of it, Alabama is poised to execute Lee by nitrogen-gassing or “nitrogen hypoxia” sometime during a 30-hour window starting June 11 and ending June 12.
Ominously, Alabama’s last nitrogen-gassing was the October 23rd torture of yet another Black man named Anthony Boyd. Following Boyd’s execution, the New York Times reported “Witnesses described seeing Mr. Boyd convulse and heave for about 15 minutes before being pronounced dead about 15 minutes later.” The Times recounted that “Lee Hedgepeth, a journalist in Alabama who witnessed the execution, said he counted Mr. Boyd gasp for air for more than 225 times before he was pronounced dead.” Reverend Jeff Hood, a spiritual advisor to Mr. Boyd who was in the execution chamber, was also reported saying Boyd was “suffocating, trying to breathe for 19 minutes.”
Alabama has savagely used nitrogen to kill seven men so far; 5 of these men were white and two were Black. Since this column is about Alabama’s torture of Black men, I want to conclude by focusing on Alabama’s first experimental nitrogen-gassing of a Black man, the February 2025 torture-execution of Demetrius Frazier. Reporter Ivana Hrynkiw who witnessed Frazier’s last minutes alive described how “About 6:11 p.m., Frazier started waiving his hands in circles toward his body. About a minute later his hands stopped moving. At approximately 6:12 p.m. Frazier clenched his face, and his nostrils flared, while his hands quivered. He appeared to say something, which was inaudible to the three witness rooms. His legs slightly lifted up off the gurney and he gasped. Then, his head rolled to the right side. Frazier exhibited sporadic gasping and shallow breathing until about 6:20 p.m. The curtains closed at 6:29 p.m., and his time of death declared seven minutes later[.]”
Adding to its extensive history of racial violence during and after slavery, the gas-torturing of Demetrius Frazier and Anthony Boyd are part of the modern-day record of Black men Alabama’s tortured to death the state will be building on if it goes forward with the nitrogen-gassing of Jeffrey Lee.
This essay was first published by The Times of Israel. It is being published here with the permission of the author.
Stephen Cooper is a former D.C. public. defender who worked as an assistant federal public defender in Alabama between 2012 and 2015. He has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers in the United States and overseas. He writes full-time and lives in Woodland Hills, California. Read more of his writing at http://www.stephenacooper.net.
