A decade ago, Michigan refused to send one of its inmates to California, a state where that man might have been executed. Now, lawyers for Demetrius Frazier want to know why Michigan won’t afford the same courtesy to Frazier and demand he be returned from Alabama before the state kills him.

Frazier’s lawyers, in a Friday letter to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, drew a contrast between Michigan’s response in the case of Clarence Ray Jr. and Frazier’s case, and sought help from the governor.

Frazier is set to die sometime within a 30-hour-period starting at midnight on Thursday, Feb. 6 and ending at 6 a.m. on Feb. 7. Frazier is set to die by inhaling pure nitrogen through a gas mask.

The 52-year-old was sentenced to death for the slaying of Pauline Brown, who was shot to death and raped in her Birmingham apartment in 1991. Frazier was also convicted in a separate killing in his home state of Michigan: The shooting death of a 14-year-old girl in 1992.

His lawyers are asking Whitmer to demand Frazier’s return to Michigan and allow him to serve his life sentence in a prison there.

“You have the absolute authority to demand Mr. Frazier’s return,” wrote Frazier’s lawyers from the Federal Defenders Office.

It’s the second request they’ve made of the northern governor; the first was met with a response from Whitmer’s staff, indicating the governor wouldn’t act at that time.

Fraizer was arrested in Detroit in 1992 for the murder of the young girl, who had been found shot in the head. During his talks with police there, he admitted to Brown’s slaying in Alabama the year before.

Frazier was convicted in Michigan for criminal sexual conduct, robbery, and the teenager’s slaying. There, he was given three life sentences.

In 1995, Michigan authorities brought Frazier to Alabama, where he was tried for Brown’s killing, found guilty and sentenced to death. The Michigan authorities then brought him back north, where he was imprisoned.

Michigan does not have the death penalty, and its state constitution banned it in 1963.

Yet in 2011, then-Govs. Robert Bentley of Alabama and Rick Snyder of Michigan created an executive agreement to transfer Frazier to Alabama, according to documents signed by the governors and attached to Frazier’s lawsuit. Frazier’s team has argued that agreement was unlawful.

No explanation was provided in the documents as to why the transfer was initiated.

And the Friday letter suggests it was contradictory, too.

“Four years after secretly transferring Mr. Frazier to Alabama, Governor Snyder refused to extradite Clarence Ray Jr., a Michigan prisoner serving life without parole for murder, to face execution in California. When California requested Mr. Ray, Michigan officials explained they do not send Michigan prisoners to death penalty states until their primary Michigan sentences are complete,” said the letter.

Ray is currently serving a life sentence in a Lapeer, MI, prison, according to prison records.

A California television station KGET reported in 2015 that Ray, while in a Michigan lockup, confessed to a 1984 murder in Bakersfield, CA. After his confession, he was convicted in the Golden State and sentenced to die. But the California prosecutors, according to the TV station, said Ray wouldn’t be turned over to California prison officials until after he died.

“Michigan officials even told the D.A. that they do not turn over inmates to states where the death penalty is used,” the report stated.

Frazier’s lawyers cited the case in their Friday letter. “There is no principled distinction between the circumstances of Messrs. Frazier and Ray: both were convicted of Michigan murders first, received life sentences, and were temporarily transferred to death penalty states (under the law) for trial before being returned to finish serving their Michigan sentences.”

Frazier’s attorneys brought their claim to federal court earlier this month, and after Michigan prison officials said they didn’t want Frazier back, the lawyers dropped the case.

They’re also seeking a different federal judge to rule on Frazier’s argument that Alabama’s nitrogen gas execution method causes superadded pain and amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. Frazier’s lawyers are asking that he not be executed until the case can be fully argued, or that he be executed using nitrogen only after being first given a sedative– specifically, the first drug in Alabama’s three-drug lethal injection cocktail.

U.S. District Judge Emily Marks has yet to rule in that case.