In Texas, Blaine Millum is executed for the exorcism of a baby girl. In Alabama, Jeffrey West is executed for killing two mothers while robbing a gas station.
The US expands how it runs
Most death row inmates faced one method of execution in modern history. Now there are many alternative ways to die.
Texas and Alabama are poised to run death row inmates within minutes on the same day this week.
On Thursday, September 25th, Alabama is set to run 50-year-old Geoffrey West with a relatively new method of nitrogen gas. He was convicted of the 1997 murder of his mother, Margaret Parrish Berry, while robbing the gas station where she worked.
Around the same time, Texas is set to run the 35-year-old Brain Mirror, what Milam and her mother described as “exorcism,” with a fatal injection for the 2008 death of his girlfriend’s 13-month-old baby. Milam was interviewed by German filmmaker Werner Herzog for a 2013 series called “on Death Row.”
Both runs are scheduled until 6pm. If they move forward as expected, the number of executions in the United States this year reaches 33, the most in a year since 2014. Additionally, this year’s execution was held on the same day.
When their time runs out, USA Today looks at each inmate and who the victim is.
Jeffrey West’s victim son: “I don’t want revenge.”
Will Berry was 11 years old. She was lying on the floor during a robbery that earned $250 when West shot her mother, 33, in the back of her head, court documents say. But Berry doesn’t want Alabama to carry out the West, which was 21 at the time of the crime, Berry wrote in an opinion piece published last week with Montgomery advertisers, part of the USA Today Network.
“It won’t take my mother back,” he wrote. “I believe Alabama plays God by trying to execute Mr West. I don’t want to revenge either my name or my mother.”
According to archived stories from the Birmingham News, Margaret Berry, the mother of two, worked at a gas station for several days when West stole it along with her 17-year-old girlfriend.
Berry says he believes that sentences for life without parole are mere punishment. “I think there is an end to this story where Mr. West and I find comfort in each other in the healing power of comfort and forgiveness,” he wrote.
Berry also expressed his dissatisfaction that the Alabama Attorney General’s office had requested that an execution date be set and that no one in Gov. Kay Ivy’s office had informed him when it was scheduled. He added that he hopes that the executions will be on commute, or at least delayed, so that he can meet West and meet “the heart of the heart.”
“I want to forgive him, my mother forgive him, and to tell him that God loves him,” he wrote. “My life has been extremely difficult. I hope Governor Ivy will see how to give me this measure of comfort, and I pray she will find it to save Mr West’s life.”
Ivy wrote to Berry in response, telling him he would not commute to death sentences and ask the Department of Corrections to promote meetings despite policies for in-person visits at prisons and in-person visits between the victims.
Ivy said she previously sentenced one prisoner to death on the victim’s family’s objections, but unlike the West, she “had serious questions about whether the prisoner was really guilty.”
“Alabama law imposes death as a punishment for the worst form of murder,” Ivy wrote in Berry. “This is to stop future murders, prevent killers from killing again, and express the rage of society over such a terrible crime. As governor, it is my strict obligation to carry out these laws.”
Blaine Millum: “I didn’t kill my little girl.”
On December 2, 2008, 18-year-old Brain Millam called 911 to report his daughter’s death in a trailer home just outside Tatum, a small rural town in East Texas near Rhine, Louisiana. (Milam was not her father, but her mother’s fiance.)
When investigators arrive, they find the brutal body of 13 months old Amora Bain Carson. The injuries included 24 bite marks, 18 broken ribs, head to toe fractures, liver tears, liver tears, and a massive injury of nature.
“It’s a bad thing to see in 30 years of law enforcement,” Lt. Col. Reynol Humber, of the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, told the Longview News Journal in 2008.
Jeseca Carson, 18, the mother of Milam and Amora, initially told investigators that they left the girl alone for about an hour and then returned to find her dead. When investigators pushed them against them in separate interviews, they eventually said Amora was enveloped in demons and needed an exorcism. Their stories were varied as to who later killed her.
Carson was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Milam was sentenced to death. At the time, he was the youngest death row inmate in the United States.
In a 2013 documentary interviewed by filmmaker Herzog, Miram is Amora is “a great girl” and her first word is “daddy,” referring to Miram.
“I didn’t kill my little girl,” he said in an interview. “I wish I could go back and stop her, but I can’t. I don’t know how that got me to this point, but I did.”
Miram’s lawyers are fighting for access to all DNA testing in the case, and are filing a lawsuit that state post-conviction relief proceedings “in this case, Miram acted to rob the interests of his life and freedom without a legitimate process.”
They also claim that Millam had been unfairly tried for evidence of unreliable bite marks and that he is intellectually disabled. The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit refused to argue.
Milam’s execution is scheduled twice, but both remained on appeal.
When is the next scheduled run?
Nine more executions are scheduled for in eight states by the end of the year after West and Millam, with the US not being seen since 2012, with at least 42 prisoners dead.
The next run will be set on September 30th, when Florida is set to fatally inject Victor Tony Jones due to the stab wounds of Matilda and Jacob Nestle during the 1990 robbery.
It was Florida’s 13th execution, a record promoted by Gov. Ron Desantis signing more death warrants than ever before. Before this year, the most executions Florida has carried out in a year were eight.
October will be a particularly busy month for executions. Seven are scheduled. Five of them will take place in Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Texas and Arizona for just one four-day period.
Most notably, the scheduled execution of Texas Robert Roberson. Robert Roberson won a rare execution last year after a bipartisan fight to save lives over important questions about his guilt.
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter who covers the executions of USA Today. Follow her on x at @amandaleusat.
