Capital punishment in Michigan was legal from the founding of Sault Ste Marie in 1668 during the French colonial period, until abolition by the state legislature in 1846 (except nominally for treason).
In this early period, there were a number of cases where persons who had committed a capital crime in Detroit were transported to Montreal for trial and execution.
[11] In a rare case, Michigan-born convicted killer Demetrius Terrence Frazier, who was serving life in prison for the 1992 murder of Crystal Kendrick in Detroit, was transferred to another prison in Alabama, where he was sentenced to death for the 1991 rape-murder of Pauline Brown at the Alabama city of Birmingham.
When Frazier's death sentence was scheduled to be carried out in February 2025, his lawyers filed an appeal a month prior, seeking Frazier's return to Michigan to serve his life sentence, which would possibly spare his life since there was no capital punishment in Michigan.
[15] The 2002 conviction of Marvin Gabrion received national attention when he was sentenced to death for the murder of Rachel Timmerman in Newaygo County, Michigan.
[18] The sentence was overturned in 2013 by a panel of the Sixth Circuit, but was later reinstated 12–4 by the full court sitting en banc.