Two death row inmates get execution dates
Montgomery County man and 43-year-old from Mesquite to die
Two more Texas death row inmates — a North Texas man who murdered a newlywed couple and a convicted child killer from East Texas — now have execution dates on the calendar.
The first of those is Alvin Braziel, a Dallas County man now scheduled for execution on Dec. 11, according to Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jeremy Desel.
Braziel, now 43, was sent to death row for the deadly 1993 attack of Doug and Lora White, whom Braziel approached on a Mesquite jogging trail. After demanding money and finding the couple had none, Braziel shot the man and raped the woman at gunpoint before killing her, too, a jury found.
He wasn’t linked to the crime until 2001, when a DNA match led police to him as the primary suspect. At that point, he was already in prison for another sex crime.
His appellate attorneys challenged his sentence based on claims of subpar legal representation earlier in the case, after trial lawyers failed to bring up his abusive upbringing, family history of mental illness and childhood head injury as possible reasons to consider a life sentence instead of death.
But the courts turned him down, and on Wednesday his attorneys declined to comment.
The second of the newly scheduled execution dates is for Blaine Milam, who is slated to die Jan. 15.
Milam was sentenced to death for the 2008 slaying of his girlfriend’s toddler during a alleged botched exorcism the couple attempted in his trailer in Rusk County. The child, 13-month-old Amora, was beaten with a hammer and covered head to toe in bite marks, with injuries so extensive a medical examiner testified that it wasn’t possible to tell how the little girl died.
The case was tried in Montgomery County after extensive pretrial publicity forced a change of venue. Milam’s then-girlfriend, Jessica Carson, was sentenced to life in prison without parole, while Milam was sent to death row in 2010.
On appeal, his attorneys raised claims of misconduct by prosecutors and previous bad lawyering when his trial attorneys failed to present evidence about his “druginduced psychosis” at the time of the slaying.
His lawyer declined to comment.
The state of Texas has executed eight men this year, including two Houston-area serial killers. With Milam and Braziel scheduled, there are another nine men slated for execution in the coming months.