Texas Prisoner Who Did Not Kill Anyone Challenges Execution, Use of False Psychiatrist Testimony to Condemn Him to Die

Lawyers for Jeffery Wood (pictured), a Texas death row prisoner who is scheduled to be executed August 24 despite undisputed evidence that he has never killed anyone, have filed a new petition in state court challenging his death sentence on multiple grounds. They argue that Wood cannot be subject to the death penalty because he neither killed nor intended for anyone to be killed and was not even aware the robbery in which a codefendant killed a store clerk was going to occur. They also challenge his death sentence on the gounds that it was obtained based upon false and scientifically baseless testimony from a discredited psychiatrist that Wood would pose a future danger to society.

Wood was convicted of capital murder under the Texas doctrine called the “law of parties,” which employs an unusually broad interpretation of accomplice liability to make a defendant liable for the acts of others. He was sentenced to death for his alleged role in the murder of a store clerk in 1996 committed by another man, Daniel Reneau, while Wood was outside sitting in a truck. Reneau was executed in 2002.

Wood says he and Reneau had planned to rob the store the previous day, but that he had backed out. According to Wood, he did not know Reneau still planned to rob the store, or that Reneau had a gun with him. Jared Tyler, one of Wood’s attorneys, said, “I believe that no person in the history of the modern death penalty has been executed with as little culpability and participation in the taking of a life as Mr. Wood.”

Wood’s appeal also alleges that his right to due process was violated when the state presented false and misleading testimony from psychiatrist James Grigson, who earned the nickname “Dr. Death” for testifying in numerous Texas capital cases that the defendant would “certainly” or “absolutely” or “with 100% certainty” commit future acts of violence, including several cases in which defendants later turned out to be innocent. Three years before Wood’s hearing, Grigson was expelled from the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians and the American Psychiatric Association for ethical violations involving making psychiatric diagnoses without having examined capital defendants, predicting with certainty that they would engage in future violent acts, and basing those predictions on hypothetical questions posed by the prosecution that contained “grossly inadequate” information. Nonetheless, based on a prosecution hypothetical question and without having evaluated Wood, Grigson testified that Wood would “certainly” pose a continuing threat to society.

Wood’s jury was never told that Grigson had been expelled for similar conduct or that the professional associations had determined that his practices were unethical and unscientific.

[UPDATE: On August 19, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted a stay of execution to permit Wood to litigate his claims that the prosecution had presented false scientific evidence and that the use of false testimony from Dr. Grigson violated due process.]