Texas Set to Execute Blaine Milam for 2008 Torture Murder of Toddler

Blaine Milam, 35, is scheduled for execution for the 2008 death of his fiancée's 1-year-old daughter. The state of Texas is set to execute a man by lethal injection on Thursday for the 2008 death of his fiancée's baby. Blaine Keith Milam, 35, has been sentenced to death for killing 13-month-old Amora Bain Carson on Dec. 2, 2008 when he was 18. The September 2025 execution date is his third, after being granted two stays of execution in January 2019 and January 2021.

In late 2008, Milam called 911 and claimed he found his deceased daughter in his trailer home near Tatum, a small rural East Texas town. While he was not the child's biological father, he was engaged to the child's mother, Jesseca Carson, who was also 18 at the time.

Police arrived to find the child with severe injuries, including human bite marks, skull and rib fractures, bleeding under the scalp, a lacerated liver, a broken arm and leg, and a bleeding blood vessel in the neck consistent with strangulation. The child had also been sexually assaulted, according to injuries discovered during an autopsy. All injuries were inflicted while baby Amora was still alive.

"I've never seen anything like it," Dr. Keith Pinckard, a forensic pathologist with the Southwest Institute of Forensic Sciences in Dallas, testified at Milam's capital murder trial in 2010. As the medical examiner in the case, he ruled the child's death a homicide.

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

Milam and Carson initially told investigators they had gone to a pawn shop for about an hour and found their child deceased when they returned. In separate interviews, both admitted they'd believed Amora had been possessed by demons and were attempting to perform an exorcism. In Carson's 2011 capital murder trial, it was revealed Milam had tortured the child for 30 hours.

A Montgomery County jury found Milam, who is also a registered sex offender, guilty of capital murder in 2010. He was sentenced to death and, at the time, was the youngest person on death row in the country.

Carson was found guilty of capital murder by a Rusk County jury and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. She is serving the sentence at a female prison near Gatesville.

In a 2013 episode of Werner Herzog's documentary series "On Death Row," Milam called Amora "a great little girl" and claimed her first word was "Daddy."

"I didn't kill my little girl," Milam said in an interview for the show. "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 contested the DNA evidence used in the conviction and demanded access to all testing in the case. They also filed a lawsuit claiming the state's handling of the conviction's challenges "have operated in this case to deprive Milam of his life and liberty interests without due process."

Further, the defense argues Milam had an unfair trial due to unreliable bite mark evidence. They also claim Milam is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for capital punishment. The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected these arguments.