About 150 people are currently waiting on Texas Death Row. Four have executions scheduled before the end of 2026.
A new podcast explores what can happen in the weeks ahead of an execution date.
“The Last 12 Weeks” focuses on the case of convicted killer David Wood. But podcast host Maurice Chammah says it’s not out to prove Wood’s guilt or innocence.
“The idea was to kind of see the system on the inside from the perspective of the participants in it,” Chammah said.
Chammah is a reporter with The Marshall Project and collaborated with The New York Times to put together the podcast. He has spent years covering the death penalty and has noticed the scramble of reporting that happens in the final days before an execution.
“Sometimes it would seem like there was this big emergency, like Kim Kardashian was proclaiming that, say, Rodney Reed was innocent or John Grisham was talking about the Robert Roberson case. And you start to wonder, well, how could it be that there are all of these emergencies even after these cases have been going on for years?” Chammah said.
He says the idea for this podcast started to formulate when he received an invitation from Wood’s defense lawyers.
“So what developed was this ask of, ‘Well, can we follow you around and really embed with the defense team and watch the work up close?’” Chammah said.
The answer was yes. So Chammah and his producer Alvin Melathe joined the defense team on Zoom calls and accompanied them on investigative trips to El Paso.
“Something that surprised me was how much investigating goes on at the last minute,” Chammah said. “And I don’t think that it’s that the lawyers were negligent earlier. It’s that the finality of an execution really makes you just turn every page one more time.”
He said they spent a lot of time with defense lawyers in this final scramble.
“So they were knocking on doors of a lot of long-shot people that frankly, to me, seemed very far from the facts at hand. But then it turns out that some of those people have bombshell disclosures that seem really important and that end up going in these final appeals to the state courts,” Chammah said.
But, he said, the goal was to give listeners a sort of “360 view” of a death penalty case.
“We spent a lot of time with the mother of one of the victims in the David Wood case. I met a lot of other victim families. The lead detective in the case, who was adamant that he was guilty,” Chammah said.
David Wood was sentenced to death in 1993 for the murders of six El Paso-area women and girls in the late 1980s. Their bodies were found in the desert near the city, so Wood became known as “The Desert Killer.”
Chammah says he believes “The Last 12 Weeks” aimed to capture something never before tracked in audio.
“The one moment that really sticks out to me is that these lawyers actually approach the mother of one of the victims. And she has been adamant for 30 years that David Wood murdered her daughter. And the lawyers are just as convinced that David Wood is innocent and they try to make the case to her,” Chammah said. “And that’s just the kind of intimate, uncomfortable, complex scenario that plays out sometimes, but there’s almost never a journalist, much less a microphone in the room.”
The impact of these life-and-death cases on everyone touched by them is one aspect of the podcast he hopes listeners will key in on.
“I also hope that people take away how much happenstance and kind of human error and even arbitrariness can show up in death penalty cases,” Chammah said.
“There were so many moments where it felt like the course of this case, the life-and-death stakes, were turning on these random small moments in the field — whether somebody answers a door, whether someone feels comfortable sharing a memory… And I hope people come away understanding that for all of this big philosophical debate about whether we have the death penalty and whether it’s right or wrong, that the system we have is actually an extremely human system that is marked, really at every turn, by human frailties in some way.”
Since the 12 weeks of “The Last 12 Weeks” are in the past, listeners might know, or could easily learn, what happened to David Wood as his execution date approached. Chammah says how listeners approach that information is up to them.
“It’s a question of whether you want to know the end and then follow the podcast to understand how it got to the end, or you want to take the ride along with us,” Chammah said.
