Legal Commentary

Texecution Stayed

By TChris

Texas has not yet killed Jeffery Lee Wood. Nor should it.

Jeffery Lee Wood, 35, "has never taken a human life by his own hands," and "was outside the building in a car at the time of the murder," his attorneys said in a statement.

Daniel Reneau killed a store manager during a robbery. Texas has already executed Reneau. Wood was Reneau's accomplice in the robbery, but he didn't kill anyone. His moral responsibility for the murder is also diminished if, as Wood's lawyers argue, "his longstanding mental illness ... allowed him to be easily manipulated by the principal actor, Daniel Reneau."

A court may never agree to revisit the decision that Wood deserves the death penalty. At least Wood will not die today, as scheduled, thanks to a federal judge who stayed the execution in response to concerns that Wood is not mentally competent to be executed. [more ...]

Wood's lawyers argued that locking Wood down in solitary for 23 hours a day for the last ten years had a detrimental impact on Wood's mental health.

In 1986, the Supreme Court effectively banned executing anyone too mentally ill to understand what was to happen to them and why.

The stay will permit an evaluation of Wood's competence. The eventual decision could cause Wood's death sentence to be further postponed or set aside, but it won't address the larger issue: whether Wood deserves to die.

"Executing someone who didn't kill violates the most basic principles of justice," David Fathi, US program director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

Texas does not agree. But that's Texas.

Texas is the top executioner in the United States, having conducted 413 executions over the last 30 years, out of a national total of 1,119 for that period. It is also one of the few US states that permit capital punishment in a case involving conspiracy to murder, not murder itself.

Wood would have been the ninth Texas prisoner executed this year and the fifth this month.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on August 21, 2008 (boomark / email).