Double execution: Texas, Alabama to execute inmates at same time this week

Texas and Alabama are poised to execute death row inmates within minutes of each other on the same day this week.

On Thursday, Sept. 25, Alabama is set to execute Geoffrey West, 50, by the relatively new method of nitrogen gas. He was convicted of the 1997 murder of Margaret Parrish Berry, a mother of two, during the robbery of the gas station where she worked.

At about the same time, Texas is set to execute Blaine Milam, 35, by lethal injection for the 2008 death of his girlfriend's 13-month-old baby in what Milam and her mother described as an "exorcism." Milam was interviewed by German filmmaker Werner Herzog for a 2013 series called "On Death Row."

Both executions are scheduled for 6 p.m. CT. If they move forward as expected, the number of executions in the United States this year will reach 33, the most in a year since 2014. It's also the fifth time this year executions have been carried out on the same day.

As their time runs out, USA TODAY is looking at each inmate's case and who their victims were.

Son of Geoffrey West's victim: 'I don’t want revenge'

Will Berry was 11 when West shot his mother, 33, execution-style in the back of the head as she lay on the floor during a robbery that netted $250, court documents say. But Berry doesn't want Alabama to execute West, who was 21 at the time of the crime, Berry wrote last week in an opinion piece published in the Montgomery Advertiser, part of the USA TODAY Network.

"That won’t bring my mother back," he wrote. "I believe that in seeking to execute Mr. West, the state of Alabama is playing God. I don’t want anyone to exact revenge in my name, nor in my mother’s."

Margaret Berry, mother of two sons, had been working at the gas station for only a few days when West robbed it along with his 17-year-old girlfriend, according to an archived story in the Birmingham News.

Berry says he believes a sentence of life without parole is just punishment. "I believe there is an ending to this story where Mr. West and I find comfort in each other and in the healing power of forgiveness," he wrote.

Berry also expressed frustration that the Alabama attorney general's office didn't notify him that it had asked for an execution date to be set and that no one from Gov. Kay Ivey's office let him know when it was scheduled. He added that he wants the execution commuted or at least delayed so he can meet with West and speak to him "heart to heart."

"I want to tell him I forgive him, that my mother forgives him, and that God loves him," he wrote. "My life has been very hard. I hope that Gov. Ivey will see her way to granting me this measure of comfort, and I pray that she will find it in herself to spare Mr. West’s life."

Ivey wrote a letter to Berry in response, telling him that she would not commute the death sentence but would ask the Department of Corrections to facilitate a meeting despite the agency's policy against in-person visits between inmates and their victims "due to the inherent potential for strife and conflict."

Ivey said she previously commuted the death sentence of one inmate over the objections of the victim's family but in that case, unlike West's, there were "serious questions about whether that inmate was truly guilty."

"Alabama law imposes death as punishment for the most egregious forms of murder," Ivey wrote to Berry. "This is to deter future murders, to prevent the murderer from ever killing again, and to express society's outrage at such a terrible crime. As governor, it is my solemn duty to carry out these laws."

Blaine Milam: 'I didn't kill my little girl'

On Dec. 2, 2008, an 18-year-old Blaine Milam called 911 to report he had just found his daughter dead in his trailer home just outside Tatum, a small rural town in East Texas near the Louisiana state line. (Milam was not her father but was her mother's fiancé.)

When investigators arrived, they found the brutalized body of 13-month old Amora Bain Carson, whose injuries included 24 bite marks, 18 broken ribs, extensive skull fracturing, cuts and brusies from head to toe, a liver tear and extensive injuries to the genitals, according to court records.

"It's the worse thing I've seen in 30 years of law enforcement," Lt. Reynold Humber of the Polk County Sheriff's Office told the Longview News-Journal in 2008.

Milam and Amora's mother, then-18-year-old Jesseca Carson, initially told investigators they had left the girl alone for about an hour and returned to find her dead. As investigators pressed them in separate interviews, they eventually said Amora had become possessed by demons and needed an exorcism. Their stories later varied as to who 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 person on death row in the United States.

In the 2013 documentary in which he was interviewed by filmmaker Herzog, Milam said Amora "was a great little girl" whose first word was "Daddy," referring to Milam.

"I didn’t kill my little girl," he said in the interview. "I wish I could go back and stop her, but I can't. I don’t understand how it got this far, but it did."

Milam's attorneys have been fighting for access to all the DNA testing in the case and filed a lawsuit saying the state's postconviction relief procedures "have operated in this case to deprive Milam of his life and liberty interests without due process."

They also argue that Milam had an unfair trial because of unreliable bite mark evidence and that he is intellectually disabled. The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected his arguments.

Milam's execution has been scheduled twice, but it was stayed both times on appeal.

When is the next scheduled execution?

Nine more executions are scheduled in eight states by the end of the year after West's and Milam's, putting the United States on pace to put at least 42 inmates to death, a number that hasn't been seen since 2012. (Twenty-five people were executed in the United States last year; the all-time high is 98 executions in 1999.)

The next execution is set for Sept. 30, when Florida is set to lethally inject Victor Tony Jones for the stabbing murders of Matilda and Jacob Nestor during a robbery in 1990.

It will be Florida's 13th execution of the year, a record driven by Gov. Ron DeSantis signing more death warrants than ever before. Before this year, the most executions Florida had carried out in a single year was eight.

October will be a particularly busy month for executions; seven are scheduled. Five of them will be carried out in one four-day period alone in Florida, Mississippi, Missouri, Texas and Arizona.

Among the most notable is Texas' scheduled execution of Robert Roberson, who won a rare stay of execution last year after a bipartisan fight to spare his life over significant questions about his guilt.

Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter who covers executions for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.