A mentally stunted Texas man is slated for execution in the Lone Star state, even though everyone – from his defense team to the prosecuting attorneys – agrees he didn’t commit a capital crime.
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In his recent appeal to the Court of Criminal Appeals, Wood’s lawyers claimed Grigson lied to jurors about how many cases he had testified in and how often he found the convict to be a future danger.
This undated photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows death row inmate Jeffery Wood.
Tests showed Wood was competent, and courts have upheld those findings. The court said Wood will not be executed until those claims are resolved. Grigson was expelled in 1995 by the American Psychiatric Association for arriving at diagnosis without examining patients.
Despite the court declining to rule that Wood’s involvement was minor enough to make his execution unconstitutional, his lawyer Tyler argued that this was in fact the case.
Wood is scheduled to die by lethal injection Wednesday.
Wood was 22-years-old when he was convicted for a bungled petrol station robbery, carried out by his friend Daniel Earl Reneau, in 1996.
When Wood, who reportedly has the intelligence of a child, went inside to see what was taking Reneau so long, he saw Keeran’s body, and told police Reneau forced him at gunpoint to remove a cassette tape from the store’s security camera system. He was convicted under a Texas law that makes a participant in a capital murder crime equally culpable, even though it was Wood’s friend who shot a store clerk.
But activists, along with Wood’s attorneys, are fighting to halt the execution or at least obtain a reprieve.
The actual shooter, Reneau, was executed in 2002.
“I’m not aware of another case in which a person has been executed with as little culpability and participation as Mr. Wood, who was outside the building when it happened and who had no criminal history”, Tyler said in a statement Friday.
Three jurors from Wood’s trial have said they would have discounted Grigson’s testimony if they’d known of the expulsion, according to the appeal.
Cases where a person has been executed without having actually killed anyone themselves are incredibly rare: Only 10 executions out of more than 1,400 since the Supreme Court brought back the death penalty in 1976 involved people who did not directly kill anyone or hire someone to kill anyone. He instead points to concerns about Wood’s mental competency and the handling of his trial. Republicans, normally in favor of capital punishment, have also spoken out against the sentence.
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In a two-page opinion, the appeals court said Wood’s death sentence was based on false testimony and false scientific evidence given by a since-discredited psychiatrist who asserted that Wood would certainly pose a risk to public safety. The board had already received a similar request by a Republican legislator.
