Jeffrey Wood and the Texas Law of Parties

Today, DPIC launch­es a new pod­cast series, ​“Discussions With DPIC,” which will fea­ture month­ly, unscript­ed con­ver­sa­tions with death penal­ty experts on a wide vari­ety of top­ics. The inau­gur­al episode fea­tures a con­ver­sa­tion between Texas Defender Services staff attor­ney Kate Black and DPIC host Anne Holsinger, who dis­cuss the case of Jeffrey Wood and Texas’ unusu­al legal doc­trine known as the ​“law of par­ties.” Wood’s case gar­nered nation­al media atten­tion because he was sen­tenced to death despite hav­ing nei­ther killed any­one nor even intend­ed that a killing take place. His exe­cu­tion, which had been sched­uled for August 24, was stayed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to per­mit him to lit­i­gate a chal­lenge to the pros­e­cu­tion’s use of sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly invalid pre­dic­tions of future dan­ger­ous­ness by a psy­chi­a­trist who had been expelled from state and nation­al psy­chi­atric asso­ci­a­tions for sim­i­lar­ly improp­er tes­ti­mo­ny in the past. In the pod­cast, Black explains the law of par­ties and its appli­ca­tion in Wood’s case, and dis­cuss­es how the nation­al dia­logue that devel­oped around Wood’s case may affect the death penal­ty in the future.