The backward direction Soft Output Viterbi Algorithm (a backward SOVA) is compared with the conventional SOVA (a forward SOVA) in turbo code decoding. We find noticeable performance improvement for the backward SOVA when it is not terminated, which turns out to be due to a smaller reliability value, indicating that the termination conditions of the turbo encoder strongly affect the performance of the backward SOVA decoder. We also propose a hardware efficient serially mixed SOVA decoder composed of a forward SOVA decoder and a backward SOVA decoder. Simulation results show that the proposed serially mixed SOVA decoder has a 0.2 dB coding gain at 2.0 dB Eb/No over the forward SOVA for a typical turbo code example.