On June 18, 2026, The Marshall Project released “The Last 12 Weeks,” a podcast series detailing the weeks leading up to David Wood’s 2025 execution date in Texas. The series follows Mr. Wood’s defense team as they re-investigate his case and identify evidence overlooked by state prosecutors at trial. Hosted and reported by Maurice Chammah from The Marshall Project and Alvin Melathe from Serial Productions, the series gives a dynamic account of the usually private perspective of capital defense teams as they fight for an opportunity to present new evidence and stop their client’s execution.
“A stay is the best the lawyers can hope for here. For the court to say, ‘Hold up, there’s something potentially wrong here. Let’s send the case to a lower court to dig deeper.’ It’s highly unlikely this court will simply declare David Wood innocent, but a stay is still big. It means David Wood gets to live, and then his team can spend months or even years continuing to make the case for his innocence.”
In 2024, after losing all his appeals, Mr. Wood’s defense team obtained a sworn statement from prisoner George Hall which brought into question the legitimacy of testimony from key prosecution trial witnesses. Mr. Hall admitted that he and other incarcerated individuals were encouraged by police to falsely report that Mr. Wood confessed to committing the Desert Murders in El Paso, Texas. Greg Wiercioch, Mr. Wood’s lead attorney, agreed to permit Mr. Chammah from The Marshall Project to cover the case. Through deeply vulnerable accounts by members of Mr. Wood’s defense team, listeners hear how they grappled with challenging decisions, such as whether to visit the only living informant in the hospital, until he later died from lung cancer.
“I think it’s worth mentioning here that all of the lawyers on this call have had clients who were executed. Clients who they couldn’t save. Greg, Jeremy, Naomi, they’ve all had to sit in front of someone and tell them, ‘We’re out of options.’ They’ve all had to watch what that does to a human being, taking in the news that soon they’ll be killed. I know from stories I’ve done in the past that the execution of a client is a shattering event for habeas lawyers. One lawyer said that the finality of it is enough to give you vertigo, to watch a person who you’ve built a relationship with sometimes over years, be reduced to a few file boxes you put into storage at the office.”
Mr. Wood spent over thirty years in prison and faced a previous execution date after being convicted in 1985 of multiple killings that became known as “the Desert Murders.” After multiple bodies were uncovered in the desert in El Paso, Texas, police and prosecutors sought to determine who was responsible, ultimately using testimony from jailhouse informants as their key evidence. That same testimony was later cast into doubt by Mr. Hall’s sworn statement.
The series covers the extensive efforts made by Mr. Wood’s team leading up to his March 2025 execution date, which was halted by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (TCCA) just two days before he was scheduled to die. On July 30, 2025, the TCCA returned Mr. Wood’s case to the trial court to review his claims of innocence and ineffective representation.
In conjunction with the release of the podcast, The New York Times and The Marshall Project have also released an analysis of more than 9,000 death sentences imposed over the last 50 years, using data from the Death Penalty Information Center and Professor Frank Baumgartner.
Maurice Chammah, “The Last 12 Weeks,” The Marshall Project, The New York Times, and Serial Productions, June 18, 2026.
