Will Berry and his wife Courtney sit in front the Alabama State Capitol on Sept. 23, 2025 before delivering a petition to Gov. Kay Ivey asking her to halt the planned execution of Geoffrey West. West was convicted of killing Berry's mother, Margaret Parrish Berry, during a robbery in 1997. Berry publicly opposed West's execution, saying he wanted to have a relationship with him. West was executed on Sept. 25. (Photo courtesy Lee Hedgepeth)
Recently, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall justified an execution with language that stopped me in my tracks.
“We must stand firmly in our beliefs between right and wrong, justice and forgiveness,” he wrote. “Alabama is steadfast in our commitment to holding the guilty accountable because that is what honors the dignity of every victim. Justice is how we restore peace to the communities they leave behind.”
The statement, issued immediately after Alabama’s execution by suffocation of Geoffrey West on Sept. 25, makes a mockery of terms and concepts that are spiritually central to the Indigenous practice of peacemaking: accountability, dignity, restoration, healing, and community well-being.
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Will Berry and Geoffrey West wanted those things. West wanted to say he was sorry, every day of his life, for having killed Berry’s mother, Margaret Parrish Berry, when Berry was only 11 years old. Berry wanted to ask questions. They wanted to meet in person. They wanted to pray together.
I don’t want Alabama to execute my mother’s killer. I don’t want revenge in my name.
The Berrys learned about West’s execution date from a news story, not from the state. After it became clear that Berry opposed the execution, West’s attorneys asked me to join the defense team as a restorative justice specialist. Preparation, which typically unfolds over the course of a year, was compressed into two weeks.
I met with Berry to ask about his needs, boundaries, and aspirations within these constraints. I then met with West to develop a profile of his personal growth so that Berry could gain a sense of who he had become in the nearly three decades since his conviction. We crafted a letter of accountability to Berry that conveyed, with moral clarity, the harm he had caused. It also conveyed an understanding of the impacts his actions have had on Berry’s life.
“My mom is my best friend, and I know that’s what I took from you,” he wrote. “I can’t imagine how many times you have wanted to talk to your own mother and the pain that must have inflicted on you.”
He expressed his sincere remorse and described what has tried to do to transform himself since then, even from within the environment of deprivation and isolation on death row.
We waited as Berry’s pleas — for clemency; a reprieve, a restorative justice conference — were stonewalled by the governor’s office. In the end, the best we could do was comfort a bewildered and outraged Berry as the state did the very thing he told them would worsen his trauma and grief.
The political landscape in Alabama equates justice with punishment, but a 2023 survey of Alabamians who had lost loved ones to homicide found that only a third reported feeling better after the person who killed their loved one was incarcerated. Like Berry, more than a quarter of respondents wanted to talk with that person. They also wanted direct support: counseling, assistance with the financial burdens that come with the sudden death of a close relative, and help navigating administrative bureaucracies in the wake of their grief.
Berry’s requests echoed those of Toni and Terryln Hall who, in 2022, implored the governor to spare Joe Nathan James, Jr., the man who killed their mother, or at least allow them to meet him face to face. Berry made the same request to the governor’s constituent services representative: “It’s enough death. We don’t want no more mourning, my family or his family. I want a relationship with this man but it can’t happen if he dies. It can’t. I think it’s wrong that y’all, the state of Alabama, will let me see the man die but won’t let me visit him, hug his neck, tell him I love him and forgive him to his face.”
These needs also map onto the very restorative justice principles travestied by the attorney general’s statement. Restorative justice is predicated on what Howard Zehr called the 3 R’s: Respect, Responsibility, and Relationships. It insists on a survivor-centered system in which those directly impacted by violence are given the respect of having their voices heard and their needs understood. It also insists on the inherent dignity of those who cause harm and requires communities to support them in accepting accountability, understanding the root causes of their actions, and taking concrete steps toward transformation and repair.
Restorative processes maximize accountability by creating opportunities for those who have harmed and been harmed to dialogue with one another about the causes and impacts of violence. Above all, restorative justice emphasizes the power of relationships, understanding harm to be a breach in community trust that requires active participation from impacted parties and adjacent community members in order to restore peace.
Had the state of Alabama listened to Berry’s needs, the process could have unfolded in the time it required. I might have been able to work with each party to establish trust, create guidelines for engagement, and establish a space that is safe for expressing difficult feelings: shame, remorse, abandonment, anger, grief, and pain.
Berry might have had the time he needed to seek the additional support necessary for the trauma he was still experiencing. Both parties could have emotionally prepared themselves for a meeting that, while challenging, would have also provided opportunities for understanding and healing. The process itself would have been an important step toward transforming cultures of violence that are perpetuated, not adjudicated, by the death penalty.
Instead, Berry sat at home and waited for news that the man he wanted so much to meet was dead. He did not believe, as the attorney general’s office insisted, that West’s execution honored his dignity, nor did it honor that of his mother. “She would not have wanted this,” he insisted.
Now Will Berry, having lost his own mother, worries for the mother of Geoffrey West.
The state should no longer claim to speak on behalf of survivors if it only acknowledges pain that can be harnessed for vengeance. It does not know what to do with survivors like Will Berry who insist on restorative justice.
And in the boldest and most desperate of moves, it manipulates the rhetoric of restorative justice to mask what it is really doing: trying its very best to convince the public that “justice and forgiveness” are incompatible.
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Author: Katie Owens-Murphy