Up to date 8:00 p.m. 03.11.2025
The Texas Courtroom of Felony Appeals halted the execution of David Wooden on Tuesday, two days earlier than it was scheduled to happen. The keep was in response to proof of Wooden’s innocence and numerous constitutional violations at his trial, which Wooden’s legal professionals outlined in a prolonged petition final month. However the court docket’s order left unanswered questions: It didn’t embrace particular causes for the keep or direct a decrease court docket choose to analyze Wooden’s claims.
The keep got here amid a flurry of last-minute litigation in a number of state and federal courts. Earlier Tuesday the federal Courtroom of Appeals for the fifth Circuit directed a district court docket choose in Dallas to just accept a brand new petition from Wooden, highlighting claims of false testimony at his trial.
Initially printed 6:00 a.m. 03.07.2025
Two months in the past, Marcia Fulton acquired a knock on her door in El Paso, Texas, from legal professionals for David Wooden — a reputation she is aware of all too effectively. Wooden is going through execution on March 13 for the 1987 homicide of Fulton’s teenage daughter, Desiree Wheatley, together with 5 different women and younger girls. “I promised Desi at her gravesite that I might discover out who did this and make them pay,” Fulton advised Wooden’s legal professionals that afternoon. Now she was planning to attend the execution. “I’ll really feel prefer it’s a promise I saved to her.”
Regardless of her vow, the mom agreed to hear. Lead lawyer Greg Wiercioch, a College of Wisconsin Regulation Faculty professor, advised her that in his 16 years on the case, he’d come to consider Wooden didn’t kill her daughter or anybody else. He identified that DNA testing of a blood stain on one of many different victims’ garments had matched a distinct, unknown male, who might have additionally killed Fulton’s daughter.
Within the years because the DNA take a look at, Wooden, who’s 67, has change into one of many longest-serving loss of life row prisoners in historical past. His legal professionals have repeatedly requested state and federal courts to order testing of extra objects, however a number of judges have declined, accusing them of merely attempting to delay the execution. Wiercioch hoped Fulton would possibly assist extra testing, even when it meant extra ready.
For a second, Fulton appeared open. “You don’t wish to condemn a person to loss of life when you’re not sure,” she advised Wiercioch and Naomi Fenwick, an assistant federal public defender on the case.
However once I referred to as her a number of weeks later, she remained sure of Wooden’s guilt. “I’m not going to fault them for doing their job,” she stated of the legal professionals. “However they’re simply greedy at straws.” Two days later, Wiercioch filed a 371-page petition in state court docket making the case for Wooden’s innocence.
Protection legal professionals often carry forth new arguments and proof as execution dates loom. Prosecutors usually say the protection is primarily doing this to delay justice. In the previous few years, a number of Texas prisoners who maintained their innocence had been granted last-minute stays of execution. However judges additionally often refuse to have a look at new proof, showing to just accept the danger of executing an harmless individual.
Why do they settle for that danger? And why does the system take many years to resolve disputes over the information of homicide circumstances, solely to then seem so hasty?
The solutions are advanced, however they circle round the truth that the loss of life penalty can’t be undone, so judges have a tendency to permit for extra scrutiny. When the punishment is a jail time period, it may be carried out throughout appeals. However when the punishment is loss of life, appeals change into obstacles to the top of the method. Put one other approach, if Wooden had been sentenced to life in jail, Fulton wouldn’t be ready for his punishment to be carried out.
The U.S. Supreme Courtroom abolished after which revived the loss of life penalty within the Nineteen Seventies. As loss of life rows crammed up within the Nineteen Eighties, the few legal professionals prepared to defend these prisoners had been overwhelmed with circumstances. So that they triaged, specializing in individuals with imminent executions.
This led prosecutors and judges to accuse them of fostering a circus-like ambiance with last-minute appeals. In 1994, Supreme Courtroom Justice Antonin Scalia excoriated the pinnacle of the Texas Useful resource Middle, Mandy Welch, for submitting petitions to the court docket within the remaining hours earlier than executions. She stated her workplace had simply 18 legal professionals engaged on 220 circumstances, and Texas had set 100 execution dates the yr earlier than. So that they needed to prioritize.
Scalia’s response? “Strive tougher.”
Round that point, victims’ households had been mobilizing as a political power. In 1987, Fulton organized a protest to stress El Paso police to unravel the murders, and satisfied county leaders to supply $25,000 in reward cash. A Houston mom named Linda Kelley, whose two youngsters had been killed in 1988, testified on the Texas Legislature seven years later: “As households of victims, we will by no means discover any closure… The person that murdered my youngsters has not even been given an execution date!”
Quite a few judges cited the significance of “finality” and “closure” as they rejected appeals from loss of life row. State and federal lawmakers handed new legal guidelines to make it tougher for prisoners to problem their convictions, most famously the Antiterrorism and Efficient Loss of life Penalty Act of 1996. The legislation created tighter deadlines and extra authorized boundaries for rounds of attraction after the primary, which raised the danger that an harmless individual is likely to be executed.
And but, satirically, the common period of time from a loss of life sentence to an execution greater than tripled — from greater than six years in 1984 to 22 years in 2019, in line with the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.
“The legislation was meant to eliminate frivolous claims, however it ended up creating new litigation over whether or not claims could possibly be made,” stated College of Richmond legislation professor Corinna Barrett Lain, creator of the brand new e-book, “Secrets and techniques of the Killing State.”
On the similar time, protection legal professionals continued to triage. Wooden was sentenced to loss of life in 1992. As a number of legal professionals examined his conviction, his case sat in state and federal courts on attraction for so long as 4 years at a time. Shortly earlier than his authentic 2009 execution date, Wiercioch agreed to assist him argue that he didn’t qualify for execution attributable to mental incapacity.
They finally misplaced that argument, however not earlier than a state court docket issued a keep to think about it, sooner or later earlier than Wooden was scheduled to be put to loss of life by deadly injection. Fulton, who had pushed greater than 700 miles to Huntsville to witness Wooden’s execution, left dissatisfied. “I used to be so naive,” she advised me. “We needed to come house, and we saved ready.”
Two years later, at Wiercioch’s request, the state examined a number of crime-scene objects, and the DNA on the sufferer’s clothes matched the unknown man. State Choose Bert Richardson dominated the brand new outcomes “merely muddy the waters” and halted any additional testing.
Wiercioch then realized by means of his litigation that El Paso police had misplaced or destroyed some proof. He additionally asserted that Richardson had a battle of curiosity, having used his rulings towards Wooden in his election marketing campaign. Federal and state courts dismissed this situation. (Richardson declined an interview.)
Wiercioch maintains that he met his deadlines and raised points as he realized about them, typically ready till one authorized query was resolved as a result of it might form how he argued the following one. He advised me that if state prosecutors had agreed to DNA take a look at extra objects again in 2011, the litigation could have been resolved extra shortly. However the Texas Legal professional Basic’s Workplace — which didn’t reply to an electronic mail for this story — accused Wiercioch in court docket of elevating claims one after the other to intentionally sluggish the method down.
Final Could, the Texas Courtroom of Felony Appeals dominated towards Wooden’s request for extra DNA testing. “The piecemeal litigation of claims in a death-penalty case is a basic signal of purposeful delay,” Presiding Choose Sharon Keller wrote.
In speaking about delay, Keller was counting on language added by Texas lawmakers to state legislation in 2000. They’d frightened that drawn-out DNA testing would possibly rob victims’ households of closure, in line with interviews I performed for my e-book on the Texas loss of life penalty.
After the denial, “I used to be abruptly fearful of an execution date set and never having any assist in any respect,” stated Wiercioch. So he requested legal professionals from the Federal Public Defender for the Northern District of Texas to affix the case, and a federal choose agreed to nominate them final June.
Texas state judges are actually contemplating the brand new petition from Wiercioch and the federal defenders, which incorporates some proof they may not have found earlier: Final September, a person named George Corridor referred to as Wiercioch and gave an in depth account of how two key witnesses had lied at Wooden’s trial. He had waited greater than three many years to come back ahead, afraid of retribution from the state.
Not one of the legal professionals’ discoveries show Wooden’s innocence definitively on their very own. However they elevate questions {that a} collection of state and federal courts are actually contemplating, with days till his scheduled execution.
If a court docket stays Wooden’s execution once more, Fulton should maintain ready. Some students have argued that the loss of life penalty, with its assured appeals, forces victims’ households by means of emotional ups and downs they might not in any other case confront. However regardless of Fulton’s frustration with the method, she stays dedicated to witnessing Wooden’s execution.
“I believe I’ll take a sigh after which my first full breath in 37 years,” she advised me. “I’m 72, however I’m not going anyplace till he’s gone.”
