Jeff Wood, 22, waited in a Texaco parking lot in Kerrville, Texas, a town of less than 20,000 people. It was 6 AM on the morning after New Year's Day, 1996. Daniel Reneau, a "drifter" whom Wood had met a few months prior, had run inside the gas station for a second while Wood waited in the car. Wood said later he thought Reneau was just going to buy some snacks. Instead, Reneau walked inside, pulled out a gun, and demanded that the clerk, 31-year-old Kriss Keeran, open the safe. When Keeran didn't move fast enough, Reneau shot him in the head and killed him.
Wood often hung out at that Texaco, stopping by multiple times a day, and he and Reneau both knew Keeran. In fact the three men, along with another Texaco employee, had allegedly hatched a plan to rob the store's safe on New Years Day, when it was likely to be full of holiday cash. But Keeran and the other employee had backed out, and January 1 came and went. It seemed like the plan was dead.
Wood ran inside when he heard the gunshots. Reneau, frantic, pointed the gun at him, threatening his young daughter's life if he didn't help steal the safe and the surveillance footage. The two men drove away without being caught, but within 24 hours they were both arrested. Both men were charged, tried, and convicted of capital murder—Reneau in 1997, and Wood one year later. Both were sentenced to death.
Wood pulled no trigger. He killed no one. He was outside in the car when Keeran was murdered. There's no proof he knew that Reneau was going to pull a gun on Keeran, much less shoot him. After all, the three men had been in on the original scheme together. It's not even clear that Wood knew Reneau had a gun—he gave conflicting statements to police during interrogation, but a witness claimed that Wood specifically told Reneau to leave his gun at home. (Wood's supporters assert that he falsely confessed to knowing about the gun after hours of interrogation without counsel.)
Yet despite all of this, if all goes according to plan, next Wednesday a couple of Texas state employees will strap Wood down and inject him with pentobarbital, which will eventually stop his heart from beating. Today is Wood's 43rd birthday. Barring a miracle, he won't make it to 43 and a week.
Sign and send a letter to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles: Grant clemency for Jeffrey Wood.
Jeff Wood is being murdered by the state for a murder that everyone agrees he did not commit.
Anti-death penalty advocates that believe the state simply should not be in the killing business find Wood's sentence unjust at its baseline. But even many death penalty supporters, including some conservatives, find Wood's looming death to be an outrage—a sign of excessive government overreach and yet another example of America's outlandish punitiveness.
“I simply do not believe that Mr. Wood is deserving of the death sentence,” state Rep. Jeff Leach, a Republican from Plano, recently told the Texas Tribune. “I can’t sit quietly by and not say anything.”
To understand how Wood could be put to death for a murder he didn't commit, you have to understand the variance of America's death penalty jurisprudence. Last month marked 40 years since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia, ending a four-year moratorium. Since then, death penalty doctrine has evolved somewhat unevenly. The Court has fluctuated between setting stricter standards in some instances and refusing to regulate in others.
But one area where the court's shift has been pretty consistently progressive is death penalty eligibility. Over the last 40 years, the court has narrowed the scope of who could get the death penalty and why. Since 1976, the Court has outlawed the death penalty for children under age 18, for the mentally handicapped, and for those people determined to be "insane." They've also prohibited capital punishment for crimes that aren't murder, forbidden mandatory death sentences, required a finding of aggravating factors before recommending death, and allowed for defendants to present mitigating evidence. After each evolution, death penalty supporters would once again claim that the system had been sufficiently fine tuned, that surely now only the worst of the worst would be killed by the state.
And yet next week, Jeff Wood, who is a candidate for at least three of the above listed exceptions, is expected to be killed by the state. Wood suffers from what the Washington Post calls “debilitating emotional and intellectual impairments." He has an IQ of 80, and is considered "borderline mentally disabled." At age 12, his school psychologist called him "a very troubled youngster who is at risk for regressing to even a less functional state" and noted his tendency toward "reality-distortion." Wood suffered from signs of mental illness and episodes of delusion. In fact, initially he was not even found competent to stand trial. From Wood's habeas writ:
Evidence from the competency hearing reflected that Wood was functioning academically at an elementary school level in reading and spelling. A neuropsychologist concluded that Wood was unable to appreciate the risks of conviction or rationally aid in his defense due to delusional and paranoid thinking that caused him to reject out of hand the possibility that he could be found guilty of capital murder. The neuropsychologist testified that Wood had “a delusional system” which caused him to be unable to grasp “the reality surrounding the issues specific to this case” and his role in it. Wood’s lawyer also testified at the hearing that Wood had “a delusional thought process that affects his ability to appreciate culpability.” He perceived his lawyer as part of a conspiracy that was forming against him.
From the Post:
Wood was committed to a mental health hospital after he was found incompetent […] But Wood was released after 15 days in the hospital. Court records say the hospital tested his factual understanding of legal proceedings but not his ability to be rational.
This time, he was deemed competent to stand trial. A jury, not knowing about the neuropsychologist’s assessment of his mental state, found him guilty of capital murder.
How is it that Wood, a delusional, mentally disabled man who didn’t kill anyone, could be sentenced to death?
The answer is Texas's Law of Parties. The law says in part that a person is equally criminally responsible for another's criminal actions if, "in the attempt to carry out a conspiracy to commit one felony, another felony is committed by one of the conspirators." In other words, a person is guilty of the other felony, even if they didn't commit the felony or intend for it to happen, as long as the offense was committed "in furtherance" of the original felony and "was one that should have been anticipated."[1] This is the reason Wood was convicted of murder.
The multi-part law is not exactly simple, but is somewhat analogous to the felony murder rule as it applies to co-conspirators. To secure a murder conviction, the prosecution typically must prove that the defendant had the intent to kill. But a felony murder doesn't require proof of intention. Under the felony murder rule, a defendant can be convicted of murder if someone dies during the commission of a felony, even if there's no intention. This applies to co-conspirators and accomplices, as well—a person can be convicted of murder if their co-conspirator causes someone's death during the commission of a felony.
The above definitions are dense and dry and intangible, and these laws may not sound very controversial. Indeed, they aren't. Equal liability for a co-conspirator's misdeeds is a common concept in criminal law. But just because it’s run-of-the-mill doesn't make it reasonable. These laws contribute markedly to America's bloated criminal justice system by making it possible to convict someone for a murder they didn't commit, didn't intend, and didn't even anticipate.
Law of Parties and felony murder laws have real impact. Take Ryan Holle, for example. In 2003, the 20-year-old Pensacola man lent his car to a friend. The friend used the car to drive three other men to a drug dealers house. The plan was to steal a safe, but the burglary "turned violent" and in the end an 18-year-old girl had been beaten to death.
Holle didn't kill anyone. He wasn't even at the scene of the crime. All he did was lend a friend his car. But he was prosecuted as an accomplice, convicted of murder, and sentenced to life without parole.
"A prosecutor explained the theory to the jury at Mr. Holle’s trial in Pensacola," reported the New York Times in 2007. "'No car, no crime,' said the prosecutor, David Rimmer. 'No car, no consequences. No car, no murder.'"
There are countless stories like this, where a person is convicted of a murder they didn't cause and couldn't have possibly foreseen. Take this one, from Reason:
In [Illinois in] 2008, three teenagers broke into a home while two friends waited outside. A person inside the home, surprised by the burglars, shot and killed one of the boys. While the shooter wasn't prosecuted for the killing because he acted in self-defense, two of the teenage boys were charged with first-degree murder. Both boys took a plea deal, in which they pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and burglary, and were both sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Or this 1989 story from a Boston University Law Review article:
Suspecting Allison Jenkins of drug possession, an Illinois police officer chased him at gunpoint. As the officer caught him by the arm, Jenkins tried to shake free. The officer tackled Jenkins and fired the gun as they fell, killing his own partner. Jenkins was convicted of felony murder, predicated on battery of a police officer. No drugs were found.
Not all felony murder or Law of Parties cases are this extreme, and in many states there are more extensive guidelines. But by definition, these cases attribute intent where it doesn't exist.
As an idea, felony murder is archaic, a leftover relic of English common law from half a millennium ago. Other countries, including the U.K., have gotten rid of it over time, but America has clutched on tight. In the ecosystem of criminal liability, felony murder is basically the roach—it has been around forever and refuses to die.
So why is it that we insist on convicting people of intentional murder, even without the murder or the intent? From The Marshall Project:
Defenders of the statute believe that such rules hold people accountable for the consequences of their crimes. "We don't really want people dying and sort of shrugging our shoulders and say, 'Oh well,'" Elkhart County Prosecutor Curtis Hill told the Indianapolis Star, as the court considered the Elkhart Four’s appeal. "Part of our justice system is to bring closure and completeness in terms of what happened, why it happened and what ought to be done."
But this is a weak argument at best. Criminal liability is based in a dual analysis—actus reus (the guilty act) and mens rea (the guilty mind). The worst crimes have extreme elements of both. Some crimes require just one or the other. Yet, these laws allow a person to be tried, convicted, and sentenced for crimes in which they did not commit the guilty act nor possess the guilty mind. What kind of closure and completeness does that bring?
There's also another reason felony murder has managed to stick around: prosecutors.
After all, felony murder is an invaluable tool for the state. It eliminates the pressure to prove a defendant intended to act—or acted at all. And when a prosecutor wants a defendant to testify, provide information, or simply plea their case, felony murder is an invaluable bargaining chip.
“I’ve always been skeptical of the fairness of the felony-murder rule,” former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark once said. “It’s a prosecutor’s tool. It fails to demand discriminating fact finding by the jury. You’re supposed to be presumed innocent, obviously, until proven guilty. In a gang scene with the charge of felony murder you almost have a standard of guilt by association.”
Felony murder is the perfect storm—giving more power to prosecutors, resulting in longer sentences, but requiring less proof.
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Most felony murder cases don't end in death sentences. At last count there were only 10 known non-triggermen waiting to be put to death.
The Law of Parties isn't the only thing that led to Wood's conviction. Capital murder cases are complicated with immeasurable variables, and there were many problems with Wood's trial. Take, for example, the testimony of the prosecution's expert witness, a forensic psychiatrist named James Grigson and nicknamed Dr. Death. From The Washington Post:
Grigson didn’t personally examine Wood. But during the sentencing phase of the trial, the forensic psychiatrist told jurors that Wood would “most certainly” commit violent crimes in the future, according to court records.
The prosecuting attorney elicited that response by describing a hypothetical situation that laid out the facts of the case.
What jurors didn’t know was that […] [i]n 1995, three years before Wood’s trial, Grigson was expelled from the American Psychiatric Association and its Texas branch at that time, the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians, for predicting a defendant’s potential threat to society based solely on a hypothetical. The expulsions followed an investigation by the Texas association’s ethics committee, which cited Grigson’s “willfully narrow rendition of psychiatric knowledge.”
Grigson was one of the many reasons Wood faced such an uphill battle at trial. But while those issues were contributing factors to Wood's impending execution, they were not the proximate cause. That award goes to The Law of Parties. Without it, Wood wouldn't have been facing the death penalty.
The majority of the reporting on Wood's sentence has gotten the Law of Parties wrong as it applies to capital punishment cases. While the law of parties only requires that the defendant should have anticipated a co-conspirator’s felony, Texas criminal procedure requires that juries find that the defendant actually anticipated it before sentencing someone to death.
This, however, is a technical detail that shouldn't obscure the larger point. Texas admits Wood didn't kill anyone. They haven't proved intent. And yet, unless something drastic happens, they are still planning on killing him next Wednesday.
“I’m not aware of another case in which a person has been executed with as minimal participation and culpability as Jeff,” said his lawyer, Jared Tyler. “It’s a national first in that regard if the state does actually execute him.”
Sign and send a letter to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles: Grant clemency for Jeffrey Wood
[1]Note that this standard gets more complicated in capital cases.