Alabama is set to execute its first inmate of 2025 in February, following a record-setting year of executions.

Gov. Kay Ivey’s office on Tuesday announced that Demetrius Frazier will be executed sometime in a 30-hour-timeframe starting at midnight on Thursday, Feb. 6 and ending at 6 a.m. on Feb, 7. Frazier is set to die by suffocation with nitrogen gas.

Frazier, 52, was sent to Alabama Death Row in 1996 for the slaying of Pauline Brown in Jefferson County.

A jury recommended by a vote of 10-2 that Frazier be sentenced to death.

Court records show that on Nov. 27, 1991, Frazier broke into Brown’s apartment through a window. She was asleep at the time, but awoke when he entered and demanded money. She gave him cash from her purse and, court records show, Frazier forced Brown to have sex with him at gunpoint.

He then shot her in the head.

According to court records, Frazier left the apartment to make sure no one had heard the shot, then went back to look for more money. He had a snack in the dead woman’s kitchen before leaving the apartment.

But Frazier hasn’t spent the last 30 years at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, where most of the state’s death row is housed. He was serving prison time in Michigan until 2011, when he was transferred back to Alabama.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Frazier’s case in 2019.

Currently, Frazier’s lawyers from the Federal Defenders for the Middle District of Alabama are suing the state in federal court, arguing the state’s protocol for nitrogen executions “is designed to inflict superadded terror or pain.”

Nitrogen executions, while legal in other states, have only been carried out in Alabama. There were three last year in the state: Kenneth Smith, Alan Miller, and Carey Grayson. Those executions drew international outrage at the new method.

And last year, Alabama led the country in executions with six.

It’s the first time Alabama has executed more people than any other state.

The Death Penalty Information Center, a national nonprofit who provides data and analysis on capital punishment, released its year-end report and showed that while nine states carried out executions in 2024, just four states made up three-fourths of the total 25 executions.