Alabama nitrogen-gassing unwanted by victim’s son

In 2024, Governor Kay Ivey ordered the most executions of any state, a move I wrote showed “Alabama’s justice system treats human beings like hogs.” This year hasn’t been different as I wrote back in February in “Atrocity after atrocity in Alabama”; in April in “Alabama’s torturous death penalty hums on”; and, most recently, just a few weeks ago in “shoot me, hang me, just please don’t gas me,” which in Alabama are “the desperately grim pleas for mercy from the condemned.” 

In that last essay I highlighted how, “Alabama has savagely gas-tortured five human beings to death since early 2024—and a 6th nitrogen-gassing is planned in the state on September 25, and a 7th on October 23.” I insisted that “men and women of conscience must protest courts, politicians, lawyers, and the correctional officers who have allowed Alabama—and all of mankind—to descend so low with these nitrogen-gassings.”  

In this essay, I want to highlight yet another reason why Governor Ivey should call this next gassing—of Geoffrey West—off, and call it off immediately: The victim’s son, Will Berry, doesn’t want the execution to go forward as he wrote in an extremely courageous opinion piece in the Alabama Reflector on September 11 (see “I don’t want Alabama to execute my mother’s killer. I don’t want revenge in my name.”). You should read the whole essay, but let me excerpt a few of the most salient parts. 

Berry writes: “I was 11 years old in 1997 when Geoffrey West shot and killed my mother, Margaret Parrish Berry, while robbing the Attalia gas station where she worked. Mr. West was sentenced to death for killing my mother. His execution date is set for September 25. But I do not want the state of Alabama to kill him. That won’t bring my mother back; it will only add to the pain I have lived with since the night she was shot. I believe there is a better way.”  

Berry very specifically advances, “I don’t want anyone to exact revenge in my name, nor in my mother’s. I believe life without the possibility of parole is just punishment.”  

Berry writes about wanting to meet with West to get the answers, healing, and closure that he needs. He’s concluded, however, because Alabama is going forward with executing West without even consulting with him, the son of the woman who was murdered: “The criminal justice system is not built with victims’ needs, wishes, and well-being in mind. I know that as well as anybody, because what is being done in my name is not what I need or want.” 

Ending his pitch for a restorative justice, harm-reductionist approach, Berry makes this plea: “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.” 

Now, on April 1, Governor Ivey signed a proclamation designating April 6 through April 12 of this year as “Crime Victims’ Rights Week.” In doing so, Ivey recognized (1) that “each of us has a moral responsibility to actively participate in the healing of others,” and (2) that “we must listen to survivors and be willing to create new options for support to ensure all victims of crime can receive help and seek justice.” 

Being a governor—or any leader—means following your own proclamations; and so, when the victim’s son passionately writes he doesn’t want his mother’s killer to be executed in a barbaric and patently torturous way, by gassing, Governor Ivey should honor his request.  

That being said, I do not predict Ivey will do the right thing. Here is why. When I first published that nitrogen-gassing is “An Abomination in Alabama”—in The Church of England Newspaper in December 2018—I contrasted the words of the great American writer James Baldwin with those of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Alabama’s greatest reverend. It wasn’t the first time I have found it useful to do so when contemplating the depravity and the status of Alabama’s death penalty, and I do so here yet again.

Because King was a steadfast death penalty-abolitionist. Unsurprisingly, in a 1957 sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church he called “Loving Your Enemies,” King said: “It is love that will save our world and our civilization, love even for our enemies.” It’s that kind of love that motivated Mr. Berry to write the plea he did—a plea to spare the man who killed his mother. 

Governor Ivey should also act in that same spirit of love, listen to Mr. Berry’s plea, and commute West’s sentence to life without the possibility of parole. But here’s where Baldwin’s bitter truth-tonic comes in. Baldwin reminds us in his magnificently piercing essay, “The Uses of the Blues,” that “Injustice, murder, the shedding of blood, unhappily are commonplace. These things happen all the time and everywhere. There is always a reason for it. People will always give themselves reasons for it.”