Episode 5: A Quiet Morning

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reminding you when you were a kid watching sports for the first time. Connections Sports Edition. To play today's puzzle, go to the athletic.com/connections. On a warm day in early March, I meet Naomi and Dallas. We're in the final stretch of this case.

Exactly one week out from David Woods execution date. And Naomi's driving up to death row to visit him. I can't be with her for the actual visit, but still I'm tagging along for the ride. All of Naomi's visits with David have come with a stress of a coming execution. But as impossible to ignore the specific context here, that is potentially her last visit

with him. I have been giving some thought to how to leave the conversation and the sense of, you know, what do we say when it's time for me to go?

“This particular question, what do I say when it's time for me to go?”

Is a thorny one for death penalty lawyers? Being face-to-face with a perfectly healthy human being has a moment of their death rapidly approaches, painfully aware of its exact manner and timing. Drag describes this last interaction as deeply unnatural, a conversation where language itself feels inadequate.

Naomi has been running scenarios in her head for how to leave it with David. She tells me she was up at 330 this morning trying to figure out just the right thing to say. It's hard because you want to be caring and you want to express compassion, but you also have to remain in the role of the new attorney. And I don't want to have some sort of, on my part, like theory, goodbye.

I might never see you again and, you know, I want to be fair in the odds, which is like,

I could see you and I might not. Naomi spends three hours inside death row, I'm waiting for her in the parking lot when she gets out. How did it go? You didn't want to talk about the case, so I just told him a little bit about, like,

noxtops and what had happened. Naomi tells me she said maybe five sentences during their entire visit. Most of the rest of it was listening to David tell stories, but as first in prison in a unit everyone called the Gladiator School, and about a summer he spent in his dad's hometown where he stole a bunch of fireworks, so his little cousins would set them off.

He also told me to never try shrumes.

Any more on that or just blanket statement? He said that he'd seen things that a human should never have to see while he was on shrumes. And he's, you know, he's worried about Greg, he's worried about his sister. He said he was going to be okay. Do you think he's going to be okay?

“Maybe I'm just trying to comfort myself, but he's really angry, you know?”

I did know that part from the hour Maurice and I spent with David, how angry he was about his case, that wasn't hard to pick up on, but Naomi had a different finish point here. Maybe a biased one, but no doubt a closer one. When our office first took on David's case, Naomi agreed to help, but didn't want to go to death road a visit with him.

Jeremy, her boss, has always made it clear that in these situations, when it's very likely that their client will be executed within months, it's not a requirement to go. But Greg told Naomi that her perspective and work on the case was something that David would want to hear about first hand, so she started heading down to see him. Their relationship, under those conditions, grew quickly.

on a legal filing.

“Even though she'd only known him for a few months, Naomi had a feel for his anxiety and”

fear. She'd come to know him in a way that defied easy category. It's this really strange relationship that is not a friendship, although it can sometimes feel like one. Like how do we describe not only like that relationship, but the grief of maybe losing

that person, like what am I really sad about here, particularly when, as far as the outside world knows, David Wood is a serial killer who also has a very violent criminal record of crimes against children. And I know, like every time I was like in the microphone say that like I'm sad, I'm like,

oh, I can just hear the, well, the families of the victims are sad because they never

got this time either.

“The thing is Alvin is if David Wood is executed, and there are family members who are”

seeking closure and peace from that, I hope they get it because otherwise, it is truly, truly pointless, how did you leave it? I told him that I really, really, really hope I had to see him again, I really hope we get this day. From serial productions, The New York Times and The Marshall Project, I'm Alvin Melath,

and I'm Maurice Chema. This is the final episode of The Last Twelve Weets.

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For this final stretch, Alvin is with Naomi and Jeremy and Dallas. I'm with Greg, who's a couple hundred miles away in Livingston, Texas. For this final push in the case, Greg is decided to set up a one-man war room at a holiday in here, about 15 minutes from Death Row.

He's in a pretty Spartan suite on the third floor that overlooks a parking lot and a dollar

store. At Death's covered in papers, a small mountain of bottled drinks, he's got more than one novel on his bedstand, which seems a little optimistic given the circumstances. Greg could do his legal work from anywhere with an internet connection, but he chooses to do it from here so that he can visit David as much as possible in these next few days.

That and because it was in this exact holiday in years ago, that he want to stay of execution for another client. He figures he'll take all the luck you can get. I plopped down on a faux leather couch in his room as he gets to work. The legal specifics of what Greg and the other lawyers are going to be up to and the run

up to the execution are interesting, and I'll get to them. But there is one not strictly legal thing I've been wondering about this moment for Greg. I'm curious about his relationship with David, what potentially losing him might mean for Greg. He explains it to me by way of comparison.

A lot of his other Death Row clients, Greg tells me, have had severe mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, communicating with them could be challenging. Greg cared for these men and fought for them, but he wouldn't describe those relationships

Certainly, not as close as one I've had with David.

“And yes, I've gotten to knowing fairly well over the years, now 16 years.”

Over those 16 years, Greg has shared more about his personal life with David than he otherwise might have with a client. When Greg's father was suffering from Alzheimer's, David asked if he could pray for him. Him painted him a card, the Greg put in his father's room. Greg saw David through the death of his younger brother, and has gotten close with David's

sister too. I was surprised at these men with their wildly different life experiences and temperaments, both referred to each other as brothers. David's allowed to invite up to five people to witness his execution, and it's common to invite family.

If things are the chance David will ask him, David hasn't brought it up yet, and Greg is sort of hoping he doesn't.

He's never watched one of his clients be executed before.

He always worried that the trauma of it would make it harder for him to do his job.

“But Greg says if David doesn't have anyone else, he'll be there.”

He doesn't want David to face death alone. In any case, this is probably the last time Greg will be in this position. He turns 16 out long ago, and though he isn't planning to retire anytime soon, he's also not planning to take on new death row clients. Another capital case at this point, given how long they last, might outlive him.

So in all likelihood, David will be his last death row client. These are the things weighing on Greg's mind as he prepares for all the work ahead of him. Most likely firing off responses to whatever court decisions and prosecution briefs come out this week. To that end, he's stocked as many fridge with yogurt, and what I'd call an apocalyptic

amount of blueberries, so we never asked to leave the room for breakfast.

He's got his other meals covered, too. So I like to have a turkey sandwich every day for lunch. So I've got my bread, I've got my processed turkey, and I've got my cheese, Swiss, and a cheddar, got my mustard. Greg's palette, I should note, is something of a running joke on the defense team.

I myself have gotten pretty stressed out watching a mortar at restaurants, asking the server

“to substitute or remove anything that sounds spicy or honestly like flavorful at all.”

He's saving the real treat, a pint of ben and cherries, for when this is all over. Ice Creamy figures will be helpful no matter how this turns out. Is Greg doing well? Back in Dallas, Naomi and Jeremy and the rest of the defense team are taking a little break from their legal strategizing to figure out a care package for Greg that might

suit his specific dietary desires. I know he likes gatorade, he likes plain chicken, plain chicken, and there's a raw chicken. Delivery order done and dusted, the team in Dallas turns back to their to-do list, following up on all the legal filings and petitions they're working on. They lay some of the options out, I think mostly for my benefit, on a whiteboard with

marker. Okay, you can be here, which is, no, that's not going to work, I've got black. There are four main avenues the lawyers are exploring to stop David Wood's execution. All four are long shots at this point, but some more than others. I'm going to quickly spell them out, roughly from the least likely to the most promising.

The least likely route by far is that the governor of Texas will intervene. He could issue a 30-day reprieve, where else is appointees on the Texas Board of Pardons and Peroles, could vote to commute the sentence, and he could approve it. This is extremely uncommon. The current governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has committed exactly one death sentence

since he came to office, more than a decade ago.

The second avenue, the US Supreme Court, is slightly more likely than the governor to

stop the execution, but only by a little. They do stay executions, but it's increasingly rare. It requires the lawyers thinking up a unique legal claim that'll hook a justice or two. In some ways, the more technical and incremental stuff usually works better, but the lawyers are also ready with a last-age moon shot.

With all else fails, the last-adjustances to rule on whether it's kosher, legally speaking, to execute someone who's proven their innocence. Believe it or not, this is not yet a settled matter of constitutional law. The third avenue is a federal circuit court, specifically the fifth circuit court of appeals, which deals with all the death penalty appeals in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

Federal courts are broadly speaking, more challenging to death for acclaims and state courts, and the fifth circuit, one of the most conservative in the country, is notoriously unfriendly the death row claims. Between 2007 and 2020, they granted habeas to relief to just one death row prisoner in Texas, one out of 151.

Which brings us to the last avenue, the highest state court for criminal cases in Texas, the CCA, the court of criminal appeals. If there's any one court that team is pinning their hopes on, it's a CCA.

The CCA has historically stayed very few executions, but if the defense team squints, they

can find a bit of silver lining. A few months ago, three new judges were elected to the bench, all three are conservative Republicans, but there's at least some uncertainty in how these new judges might rule. This mystery is what passes for optimism with habeas lawyers. If less than a week ago until the execution date, the team weirdly doesn't have much

to do but wait, they submitted what they needed to do to the governor and to the CCA. Now they're just adding their finishing touches to their federal petition and Supreme Court filings before they send those off. All of which has led to what I've observed in the hallways and Dallas as a very particular energy, boredom operating occasionally on a night's edge.

I've been called out for sometimes capitalizing the T in sometimes not capitalizing the T in T-shirt. Do we have a preference? I've struggled to think of anything I gave less of a shit about than whether we capitalise the T in T-shirt right now. Jeremy, in particular, seems pent up.

Very all dressed up with nowhere to go. On March 10, three days before the execution date, he tried to busy himself with work usually done by the office paralegal. I spy at him shuffling back and forth from his office all the way down the corridor to the printer, multiple times, personally printing copies of a writ they were going to send to the

Supreme Court, personally stapling them. Good staple. The glamorous life of a lawyer.

“The next day, on March 11th, I got to the office a little late, honestly partly because”

I'd spent several days on a row recording the functional equivalent of dead air for hours. I check in with Jeremy. Is there a miss anything? You missed absolutely nothing.

In fact, I think we obviously never know when the court opinions are going to come down, but

I think it's likely we have a relatively quiet morning. And for a little bit, it seems like Jeremy's right. Everyone is sitting quietly at their computers. I run the halls of the office, feeling a little silly wondering if pointing my microphone and Naomi's typing is a better use of my time than pointing my microphone at Jeremy staring

at the screen. And then suddenly, something happens that nobody was expecting. The fifth circuit, the federal appeals court, handed down their ruling. The lawyers are confused because in their experience, the fifth circuit usually waits until the CCA acts in these cases.

The federal courts don't tend to rule before the state courts, but they have this time. The whole office goes into a tailspin. Jeremy says he's never seen this before. He calls Greg, desperate to get him on the phone to figure this out. Greg doesn't pick up.

Jeremy wonders aloud if he's on the treadmill. "What's the fucking Christ? Pick up your goddamn fan, Greg." What little restraint Jeremy's shown in this podcast with regard to cursing is not completely out the window.

"I'll Jeremy waits on Greg to respond. He skims the fifth circuit ruling. One thing that jumps out, Ramona Dismukes."

“Ramona, remember, is a woman who met the lawyers at a waterburger who told them about the”

wild plan she and her mother came up with to try and lure out the desert killer on their own. "But my mom was literally tricking me. She was like, "Listen on that wall and somebody's going to come and try to kidnap you and I'll call the cops and we'll get him."

Ramona was also the person who offered the lawyers an explanation. For why a woman named Judith Kelling said David would rape her, one of the foundations of his death sentence. "This is what she's telling me. They made a deal with me to get me out of jail, and all I got to do is test probably against

this guy. I was like, "What were you even raped?" She's like, "Yeah, I'm not my him." Like who? She said, "My pliler.

I'm like, who's this guy?"

Ramona Dismukes was never called to testify in a capital murder trial.

And so the jury never heard that claim. The pit circuit writes, "If Dismukes had testified to the facts, she states in her declaration that Kelling identified pliler as her attacker, but falsy framed wood, that would have destroyed the state's case so thoroughly, that every reasonable juror would have had a reasonable doubt about wood's guilt."

I mean, this is one of the most powerful statements I've ever seen in the Fist Circuit make. Wow. I mean, really an incredible statement. It turns out the pit circuit authorized some of the defense team's claims, including Ramona's,

being they'd like a lower court to take a look at them. There's also a catch. He explains it to Greg when he finally gets him on the phone. He was, in fact, on the treadmill. I'm walking now, so I thought I could get half our piece, but not apparently not.

What's going on? Yeah.

“So we've got incredible news and crazy fucking news, all right?”

So the Fist Circuit authorized the Brady and part of the false testimony claim, but they

In other words, for the defense team, this is roughly the equivalent of the Fist Circuit

saying, we suspect something really fishy going on here, but we're not going to be the ones to stop this execution. Jeremy snaps into action, actually snaps so fast that he runs into me as he's barking out orders to one of the lawyers. Claire, eight the fucking microphone, as I turned on a dime and Alvin wasn't quick enough.

“Can you draft a proposed order for the Northern District for the stay motion?”

Let's get that done. Naomi just very briefly, I just told this to Claire, we're going to attach Mona's declaration to this. The machine worrying into action is impressive to watch. The lawyers start typing away.

They're trying to file a motion for a stay in a lower federal court to see if they all stop the execution, even though the Fist Circuit refused to. Everyone seems somewhat gobspacked, but this is all happening because of something remona dismissed to clear it at a water burger two months ago. Officially exhibit number 62 into fence filings.

Exhibit 62 is the winner, the most important of the 115, two pages on how this shit works

sometimes, isn't it? As the lawyers are busy trying to figure out how to deal with this unexpected development from the federal courts, they get some more news. The state just filed their own response in the CCA? Are you serious?

Yeah, it's very timely of me. Why fucking morning some asshole said not too long ago? The prosecution has its say about David Wood, that's after the break. Tell me if any of this sounds familiar. Heading meat is the key to good health.

Nicotine can boost brain function. GLP ones are a miracle drug. I'm Danny Blum, and the health reporter at the New York Times. We're bombarded pretty much constantly with claims about how to live better and feel better and it's really hard to separate a fact from fiction.

“That's what really differentiates my reporting and the times is that I am scouring the”

science, I am speaking with leading experts, I am making sure that everything I write is rigorously researched, reported, and that I can back it up. And when the science is unclear, sometimes that is the story that we don't know the answers yet. And that's a level of nuance and depth that you're not going to get just floating around

the internet. That's what you get when you subscribe to The New York Times. If you already subscribe, thanks. If you'd like to, go to mytimes.com/subscribe. One of the more challenging aspects of making this podcast has been getting the prosecution

side of David Wood's case. We've been trying to get someone from the state of Texas to talk to us for months. We asked the Office of Attorney General Ken Paxon for an interview multiple times. No response. We even knocked on the doors of the two original trial prosecutors in El Paso and sent them

letters. We never heard back.

“But on Tuesday morning, shortly after the fifth circuit ruling sends the lawyers into”

a frenzy, the state of Texas finally issues its own giant brief in the case.

Two days before the execution is scheduled, the attorney general's office officially responds to each of the defense team's claims. Because the prosecutors wouldn't talk to us. This is our first real window into how they see all the new evidence. It's 63 pages and I would characterize it all as the written equivalent of an eye roll.

Like this again? The prosecution writes, none of Wood's evidence is actually new, nor is it a sculpatory. Take the DNA. One of the biggest pieces of evidence that Greg wrote about was a blood spot on a piece of victims clothing that belonged to a male contributor who's not David Wood.

This is the reason Greg still wants to get a bunch of the other evidence in the case tested too. But the prosecution writes, quote, "The presence of that DNA means nothing more than another man came into contact with that clothing. He doesn't mean David Wood is innocent."

Ramona dismukes, who the fifth circuit had singled out in their own ruling just hours earlier. Well, the AG's office had the opposite reaction to her claims. They write that dismukes has, quote, "serious credibility issues," and argue that her whole story sounds pretty unbelievable.

That this woman, Judith Kelling, would admit to making up a rape allegation to purgery effectively, and to railroading David Wood, Altra Ramona, a teenager she just met on a public street. And then there's George Hall, the man who held his tongue for 30-plus years before claiming that two jail-hust informants fabricated testimony to implicate David Wood in the desert murders.

The prosecution doesn't directly challenge Hall's claims.

this guy. Why is he only showing up now?

“Regulations, they write, "Requires more than waiting for witnesses to come forward."”

And this brings us to the throughline of the prosecution's arguments, which is a familiar one, but worded pretty sharply here. The Greg's latest petition is really just one more effort to manipulate the court. The prosecution spends several pages outlining the many, many motions Greg has filed

in the last 15 years that have ultimately been denied by the courts.

The point being, the Greg has had so much time to look for evidence of his client's innocence, and now, here he is, with more half-baked theories and conveniently urgent evidence. That if this was your first look at the case, maybe you wouldn't see it, but all you have to do is look at the record to know what's going on here. The state says, quote, "With his second execution date rapidly approaching, Wood has ramped

up his efforts to improperly delay justice. His whole attempt is, quote, "scatter shot at best, and does nothing to erode the evidence that the jury used to convict him." With a little over 50 hours to go until the execution, Greg decides to hand off the litigation for the moment to the team in Dallas.

“He wants to go visit David, to update him on everything that's happened this morning, but”

also to spend what could be some of their last few hours together. I join him in the car on the way to death row. Greg is wearing his lucky tie, a pale blue number, with circles on it. It's lucky because he wanted the Supreme Court once while wearing it. Greg is feeling a little cautious about what exactly he should tell David, given the mixed

signal they just got from the fifth circuit. "Well, I want to be careful because nothing's changed in terms of his situation, which is there still an execution in 48 hours. I don't want to say we're going to get a stay, stand down, don't prepare yourself. Still, here's some encouraging news, which might be almost like worse.

Give you some haul here without the ultimate, which is a stay of execution. That's going to hold up." Yeah, it's like you're a doctor delivering like encouraging news, but yeah, we don't have the final test results yet waiting on the labs. We park in the lot, and Greg climbs out, leaves his phone in the rental car.

He's not allowed to bring it into the prison with him. Meanwhile, back in Dallas, David Woods Pathway to a stay, gets a little more narrow. The board of Parton's and Pearls has sent word, that they voted unanimously against giving David Woods a reprieve or commutation. There are the ones who can give a recommendation of the governor, so it looks like that's

the end of Avenue 1. That's not really a big surprise to the lawyers. So, they have a tangled decision from the fifth circuit, which is a trying to deal with. They've got their chances with the Supreme Court, too. But really, the big thing they're waiting on is word from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals,

the CCA. I don't know what I was expecting when the CCA ruled, a gas coming from one of the offices, the ring of a special alarm, or something.

Instead, when the CCA ruling finally came down, we got Jeremy, signalling up to us, uncharacteristically

quiet, with a big grin on his face. What happened? The CCA stayed his execution. So, I just checked the CCA docket, the CCA docket shows the state pending further order of the court when a seven in a six-two vote, which will be a final stay, so...

I should have... I could sense you had a shitty ring run on as you were walking on over here. I must definitely did. I must definitely did. This was a moment, all the lawyers had been working toward, for the entire time, where

he's not even following them. And there's still a little stun to the tap and Jeremy is getting really amazed by the state and really proud of himself for the anti-climactic way he delivered it to all of us.

“It is not the only thing that feels casual and proportioned to the weight everyone is”

put on it. In their ruling, the CCA judge is done off for any explanation for their decision to stop the execution.

The order itself is barely three pages long, basically just a summary of the case history

and a list of the defense team's claims. The grandest day and right quote, "the state will remain in place until further order of this court." Jeremy sends a quick text to Greg, just one word, "Stay." Greg gives him a callback.

"Hey, Greg, Jeremy, I just got out, what's the scoop?" I'm with Greg outside of Death Row when he gets the news. He just came out of the prison, where he was visiting David. "Well, do you have a back inside?" "All right, I'm going to do that, I just want to see what you got there."

"Yeah." "Stay final." "Stay tuned." "All right, I'm going to get back in." "Oh, fantastic news."

"Fantastic." "Congratulations." "All right, I'm going back in." "Yeah, okay, bye." Greg bans out of the car.

He wants to be the one to tell David the news himself. He doesn't trust the prison staff or lay it. And so David might spend the entire night continuing to think he's about to be executed. It's near closing time at the prison, and so Greg literally has to run to make it through security before they close up shop for the day.

About 10 minutes later, Greg comes rushing out and gets in the car. Clearly out of breath as we peel out of the parking lot. "The holy macro, that's my dad would say, just can't believe it." He gets out his phone and calls Jeremy again. "David was overjoyed, tears in his eye, his sisters were there, they were crying, I even

got a little teary-eyed myself, Jeremy, but anyway, yeah, they were just so related. And I only stayed for a minute to tell them, and he said get some sleep, get some rest, tell everybody I love them. I said I'll be back tomorrow, I said I haven't read the order, I know it's six to two,

“I know it's going to stick, so Naomi and Claire are there, right, and Dallas?”

Yes?" "Yes." "Alright, wonderful, well, for yourself a hard one, stiff one, whatever it's going on." Greg himself plans on pizza, and of course, some Ben and Jerry's. We had to Walmart and he browsed with the freezer aisle carefully, as if he's looking

for just the right vintage of wine for the occasion. He settles on chocolate-fudge brownie and puts it down in one sitting. Meanwhile, in El Paso, Marsha Fulton had been waiting. Marsha's daughter, Desiree, was one of the Desiree killer's victims, just 15 years old when she was murdered.

Next year, we'll be the 40-year anniversary of her death. Marsha had spent most of those years anxious to see David would pay for it. She'd packed her bag and was ready to leave for Huntsville for the execution, and she got the call about the stay. Marsha then calls me, actually, and asks if I've heard the news yet.

Yeah, it's like, why are they playing this game?

“Why are the victims that wanted to keep getting victimized?”

Yeah. There's some real emotional whiplash here, going from the defense team celebration to Marsha's fury.

This is the second time she's prepared for this moment to finally keep her promise to her

daughter, only for something to get in the way. You know, I mean, 37 years, this could've been done wrapped up, I mean, there's no new evidence. And it's just that she said, well, I'm not guilty. Well, well, I would say that too, if I was facing the death penalty.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you know if you hadn't heard. Yeah. I wanted to go down to do it myself. I'll talk soon. I'll do that.

I'll do that. I'll do that. I don't know if I can do it for me. One or the two. Four and a half months ago, by before we hear anything else about David with his case from the CCA.

The judges had been silent about what exactly the next steps were here, in which of the lawyers claims they actually found persuasive.

In July 2025, the defense team finally gets an answer.

The judges write that all of their claims should be evaluated by a lower court, which means a hearing in front of a judge in El Paso. It turns out that the defense team was right to feel some optimism around the new mysterious CCA judges. One of them goes even further than the rest of the court, and writes quote, "This case should

have been resolved one way or the other long ago, and likely would have had a DNA test been ordered." He's just one of nine judges, so he can't force the issue on his own. But it does pave the way for an El Paso judge to order the testing that Greg is wanted for more than a decade now.

This ruling is about as good as it gets for the defense team, and the day it comes out, Alvin and I hop on the phone with Greg and Jeremy to talk about it. For a case that had such long odds when we started following these lawyers around, I was fully prepared for a bit of gloting here. But I wasn't exactly hearing them take a victory lap.

Greg had spent all of those weeks we were with him cultivating Charlie Brown optimism.

But now that he'd won, it felt like he was finally getting his bearings.

And while I could hear gratitude in his voice for the outcome, I could also hear some real anger about how close it all came to going the other way.

“And, you know, if David had been executed on March 13th, I think the state of Texas and”

the judges and the state and federal courts would have said, you know, well done, he got

that we upheld the principles of our Constitution and our legal system.

“The system worked, of course, that's probably what they'd say now too, right?”

The system worked, hey, this, we're going to give this guy a shot who might be innocent. Greg, it's probably clear it does not think the system worked, or rather he doesn't think that capital S system works. And he hates that perhaps all the time in the skill and dedication that he's given to David with his case might be used as an example of a system operating as it should.

The idea that all the lawyers in this case are zealously representing their sides, and that the judges are giving deliberate consideration to all the arguments, calling balls and strikes. That this process, though imperfect, is nevertheless the best that humans can do.

Greg sees it all as much more precarious than that.

Jeremy, as usual, puts it more bluntly. Yeah, I mean, just fucking crazy, right? I mean, Greg has like a nice, like, answer that I totally agree with, too, but like, you

“know, if Greg doesn't get involved in David's case, you know, 15, 20 years ago, whatever”

it was, he would be next to you to the long time ago. And none of these claims would have ever seen the light a day. In 1972, the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty, halting executions across the country. Some of the justices wrote about racism, but actually their biggest focus was arbitrariness,

that a bunch of people committed horrible crimes every year, and you actually got the death penalty was incredibly random. So the death penalty disappeared for a few years, and then politicians wrote new laws to try to make it less random, and the Supreme Court allowed executions to start up again. What we're about to hit the 50-year anniversary of a supposedly new and improved death penalty,

a half century with almost 1,700 executions. Watching David Woods defense lawyers over the last 12 weeks, I feel confident in saying, "It's still arbitrary." Not just in who gets put to death, but in who gets a stay. For instance, it was arbitrary that David would got a lawyer as devoted as Greg, and

that he could unlist a team as devoted as Jeremy's. It was arbitrary that George Hall was still alive, an off-per-roll, and willing to tell his story about the jailhouse informants. That reminder to his mugs just happened to be back in El Paso, and willing to tell her story at a waterburger.

That some judges believe these stories enough to stop the execution felt arbitrary. But if they hadn't bought it, David would be dead right now, and that would feel arbitrary too. We began following these lawyers thinking we'd get to watch their tactics, wondering if they were selling a story, or raising legitimate doubts about an unjust conviction.

“And in the end, I think both might be true, and neither is really the point.”

The point is that somehow we've arrived at a place where two separate courts, one federal and one state, have both found serious problems in this case. And this is after 30-plus years, and layers and layers of appeals. After this case crossed the desks of dozens of judges. So why now? While the obvious answer is that the specter of an execution sparked a certain urgency

to re-examine every little aspect of the case. But there's a trade-off too. We're lying on a deadline as irreversible as an execution is a cruel kind of bringsmanship, putting someone's life in the middle of an exhausting game of chicken. The effect goes beyond the person on death row.

You can hear it in the tired voices of attorneys, and in the jaded size of a victim's mother, too. In besides, the last 12 weeks haven't gotten us any closer to knowing what really happened in a stretch of desert in northeast El Paso in 1987. It's been more than a year since the stay of execution was issued.

David Wood's prospects have never been better, but it's almost impossible to know whether

he'll ever be declared innocent, much less walk out of prison. There's still no dates at for a hearing on David Wood's innocence claim. For all of the blame Gregg has taken for delaying this case, now other parties. The various judges and prosecutors involved are contributing to the delays too. And ironically, from Gregg's perspective, the faster things can happen now, the better.

After all, David Wood is almost 70 years old. Recently, a judge in El Paso ruled that the defense team could take depositions. Interview some people who might not have been willing to talk to them before. The judge said he's anxious to get hearings going in the fall, so he said a deadline to complete those depositions.

As of this writing, the defense team has a little less than 12 weeks.

Alvin produced the series, Gen Guera edited the series along with Anita Badajo.

“Julie Snyder is the executive editor for serial productions, additional editing from Akiva”

Solomon, fact-checking and research by Ben Falen, music supervision by Gen Guera and Phoebe

Wang, with mixing by Phoebe Wang, additional mixing by Catherine Anderson, tracking direction

“from Sean Cole. Our associate producer is Mac Miller, additional production by Anita Badajo,”

additional reporting by Anna Whirl. There's a lot about the death penalty that we couldn't

fit into this show. Stories from capital defense lawyers, a fascinating look at the data

“behind executions, you can find all of that in our newsletter, sign up for it at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.”

Original music for this series by Adam Dorne, aka MotionWorker, but Tias Basi and John Evans of Stelwagon Symphinette, additional music by Dan Powell and Marian Lazzano. Adam Dorne, aka MotionWorker, composed our theme song. Video production by Sean Devaney, our standards editor is Susan Westling, legal review from Allemine, Sumar, and Jackson Bush. The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcom. Sam Dolnik is deputy managing editor of The New York Times.

Special thanks to Michael Gratchek, Bob Moore, Nick Pittman, Stephen Rich, and Julie Whitaker. The last 12 weeks is a production of Zero Productions, The Marshall Project and The New York Times.