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Welcome to the Texas Defender Service website. |
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Texas v Jeffery Wood
The Texas Defender Service, along with attorney Scott Sullivan, has filed a clemency petition with the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on behalf of Jeffery Wood, whose execution is currently scheduled for August 21, 2008. The petition, filed with the Board on Tuesday, August 5, 2008, asks the Board to recommend a commutation of Mr. Wood’s death sentence.
Mr. Wood was convicted of capital murder under Texas’s law of parties for the actions of another person—it is undisputed that he did not shoot the victim and that he was outside at the time the murder occurred. The person who shot and killed the victim was executed by the State of Texas in 2002. Following his conviction, Mr. Wood, who because of longstanding emotional and psychological impairments was initially found incompetent to stand trial, was then sentenced to death following a complete breakdown of adversarial proceedings attributable to those same impairments.
During the penalty phase, Mr. Wood’s lawyers made no objections, cross-examined no witnesses and presented no evidence on Mr. Wood’s behalf. Additionally, the State presented the testimony of a discredited psychiatrist who had been kicked out of national and state professional associations for giving the same unethical testimony he gave in Mr. Wood’s case and who was later found by a federal district court to have consciously misled Texas juries about his experience, objectivity and accuracy in predicting future dangerousness.
Click here for more information.
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Scott Panetti's 1992
Booking Photo |
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Click here
to watch the documentary commissioned by TDS, Executing the Insane: The Case of Scott Panetti |
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