Jeff Wood was scheduled to die by lethal injection last Wednesday, Aug. 18, even though he never killed anyone.
But miraculously, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted Wood a stay of execution on Friday, which was also his 43rd birthday. From Slate:
In a per curium decision, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that a portion of Wood’s habeas appeal pertaining to “his sentence [being] obtained in violation of due process because it was based on false testimony and false scientific evidence” satisfied the requirements to be reconsidered by a lower court. “Accordingly, we remand those two claims to the trial court for resolution,” the court wrote. “Applicant's motion to stay his execution is granted pending resolution of this application.”
The testimony and evidence in question is that of James Grigson, a psychiatrist who testified in Wood's case and said Wood would "most certainly" commit a violent crime again—despite never having met him.
Remarkably, of the nine judges on the Texas Criminal Appeals Court, two of them dissented from the ruling, including Presiding Judge Sharon Keller and Judge Lawrence Meyers.
Meyer's dissent is especially disappointing. He is quite literally the only Democrat to serve in a statewide office in Texas. He was a Republican up until 2013, and hasn't run for appeals court re-election since he became a Democrat. He did, however, run for the Texas Supreme Court in 2014. Unsurprisingly, he lost handily. Texas isn't very kind to Democrats—in 2014, the New York Times reported that the party hasn't won a statewide election since 1994. Meyer could easily lose in November against his Republican challenger, Mary Lou Keel.
Though the only Democrat voted to put Wood to death last Wednesday, seven of the eight Republicans voted in favor of staying his execution.
In fact, one of the Judges, Elsa Alcala, filed a concurring opinion where she stated that the lower court should also look at whether or not its constitutional to sentence someone to die if that person did not actually kill.
I write separately because I would also remand claims five, six, and seven, in which applicant alleges that his participation in the offense and his moral culpability are too minimal to warrant the death penalty, that evolving standards of decency now prohibit the execution of a person who was convicted as a party to a capital offense, and, more generally, that Texas's death-penalty scheme should be declared unconstitutional because it is arbitrary and fails to target the worst of the worst offenders, in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
Alcala was appointed by former Gov. Rick Perry. Her opinion underscores the discomfort that many across the ideological spectrum felt about Wood's sentence.
Read more on Wood's crime and conviction here.