# Texas court blocks execution of David Wood two days before scheduled killing

Ruling made Tuesday after lawyers share new evidence and plead for DNA testing they say could prove innocence

A  appeals court has blocked the execution of David Wood just two days before he was set to be killed by lethal injection, a major win for the 67-year-old who has for decades maintained his innocence.

The Texas court of criminal appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, issued a brief ruling on Tuesday afternoon pausing the killing of Wood, whose lawyers presented new evidence supporting his claims of wrongful conviction and pleaded for DNA testing they say could prove his innocence.



“I could never quit fighting,” Wood told the Guardian on Tuesday before the ruling, in an interview conducted through his attorney. “This case is built on coercion, corruption and lies. Not a shred of my DNA connects me to any of these cases.”

For more than a decade, his lawyers have fought for more DNA tests, but the requests have been  by judges. Greg Wiercioch, Wood’s longtime lawyer, said 150 pieces of evidence remained untested, telling the Guardian in an interview on Monday: “It’s incomprehensible why the state is opposing additional testing … They shut it down I think because they’re afraid of what they’ll find out. We have DNA testing, the most powerful crime-fighting tool ever developed, and we’re not using it.”

With a lack of forensic proof, the case has rested largely on circumstantial evidence, and there have been growing doubts about the prosecution. In a 1990 memo obtained by Wood’s lawyers, prosecutors said they did not have enough evidence to indict Wood. The El Paso county district attorney’s office subsequently  crucial testimony of two jailhouse informants, Randy Wells and James Sweeney.

Sweeney received a $13,000 reward for his testimony and Wells had a capital murder charge dismissed. There has been widespread scrutiny over this kind of testimony, with advocates identifying  involving jailhouse informants where defendants were later exonerated.

In a major development for Wood, a man named  to cast serious doubts about the informants. In a sworn declaration, Hall said he spent time with Wood and the two informants in jail and recounted how detectives pressured him, Wells and Sweeney to assert that Wood had confessed. Detectives showed them files about the murders and said: “We can help you, if you can help us,” suggesting they’d assist Hall in getting off parole, according to Hall. The three men also got special treatment, including free snacks, cigarettes and free phone calls, he said.

Hall said he refused to lie for prosecutors: “I wasn’t going to railroad David Wood.” Wood had always maintained his innocence, Hall said. In 1991, Hall also wrote to prosecutors, saying Sweeney and Wells had fabricated their stories about Wood’s confession. Hall spent 30 years on parole, and was released last year, at which point he decided to come forward, no longer fearing authorities would revoke his parole.

Hall’s testimony was a “bombshell”, said Wiercioch. “Detectives were literally handing their investigative files over to all three of these guys to review before they were coached in preparation for their testimony … This is what we had suspected all along but had no hard and fast proof of.”

A lead detective in Wood’s case recently refuted that police shared files with informants, telling the Marshall Project the  was “preposterous” and insisting the case was strong without Sweeney and Wells. He pointed to other witnesses who had allegedly seen Wood with the victims and evidence suggesting fibers from Wood’s vacuum cleaner were similar to ones found at a crime scene – testimony Wood’s lawyers say was misleading.

In recent filings, Wood’s lawyers have also alleged that the truck Wood purportedly used to carry out the murders was in a salvage yard when three victims went missing and that last year, a woman came forward saying that she believed her late father, convicted of a different murder, may have been responsible for the desert killings.

The stay order issued Tuesday did not rule on any specific claims, but effectively paused the execution to give the state court more time to review Wood’s legal arguments, which include claims his conviction relied on false testimony, the state suppressed evidence and he was subject to ineffective trial counsel.

In a parallel federal process, a US appeals court also delivered Wood a favorable ruling on Tuesday, granting his attorneys another opportunity to make arguments. That court seized on Wood’s arguments that a woman who testified that Wood had raped her admitted to someone else that the assailant had been a different man. Withheld testimony casting doubt on this woman’s claims “would have destroyed the state’s case so thoroughly that every reasonable juror would have had a reasonable doubt about Wood’s guilt”, the court said.



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The Texas attorney general’s office has said in court that the ongoing motions to delay the execution were “meritless”, arguing in a recent filing that “convicted individuals have no substantive constitutional right to postconviction DNA testing” and “the public’s interest in enforcing its valid criminal judgment outweighs Wood’s request for even further delay”.

The office did not respond to inquiries on Tuesday.

Wiercioch, a University of Wisconsin law professor, said Wood had been consistent in his assertions in the 16 years he has represented him, with new evidence repeatedly substantiating his claims: “I’ve never been more firmly convinced of someone’s innocence than I am of David Wood’s.”

In the interview before the ruling, Wood said: “I’ve been in the pits of despair, the pits of hell, the pits of anger, but I will never give up.” He said he had put his faith in God as his execution date neared, adding: “My greatest concern is my family, who have had to suffer along with me … I want a fair chance at justice. I want people to know what really happened.”

Marcia Fulton, the mother of one of the teenage victims, Desiree Wheatley,  that she had met with Wood’s lawyers, listened to their pleas for more DNA testing and didn’t “fault them for doing their job”, but ultimately remained convinced of Wood’s guilt.

The case has impacted victims’ families for decades, including with an original scheduled execution date in 2009 that was stopped last minute.

“I think I’ll take a sigh and then my first full breath in 37 years,” Fulton recently . “I’m 72, but I’m not going anywhere until he’s gone.”

On Tuesday, a federal judge also issued a ruling  slated for next week, which would have been its first using nitrogen gas and the first killing in the state in 15 years.

In the last year, as several states have continued to aggressively pursue capital punishment, there has been intensifying outrage surrounding wrongful conviction cases. In South Carolina, Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah, 46, was  days after a key witness for prosecutors . And Missouri , 55, despite objections from prosecutors who fought to overturn his conviction and backed his innocence claims.
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