Hi, I’m Maurice Chammah, the host of “The Last 12 Weeks,” which is out today. Over five episodes, Serial Productions producer Alvin Melathe and I embed with a team of lawyers as they race against the clock to try to stop an execution. Their client, David Wood, was convicted as a serial killer, but the lawyers are convinced he’s innocent. We follow them as they knock on doors, hunt for evidence, and try to sell a new story about the case to the courts and the public. I’ve spent the last decade at The Marshall Project, a nonprofit outlet focused on the justice system, covering everything from MAGA sheriffs to music made behind bars. I keep being drawn back to death penalty cases because of the moral complexity and high stakes, and I ended up writing a whole book on the subject. But even after doing that, one part of the system still felt foggy to me: the last-minute scrambles by defense lawyers. You might have an idea of what I mean: the 11th-hour claims of bombshell evidence, media campaigns featuring Kim Kardashian and Dr. Phil (or, if you’re a little older, Al Sharpton and Susan Sarandon). All this usually comes after these cases have been in the courts for years and even decades. So why does it often turn into a high-profile emergency? Why do we always seem so close to executing the innocent? There’s one story from my book that I think is a useful parable and that ultimately made me want to make a podcast about this specific part of the system. It’s a story I heard from one of the country’s best capital defense lawyers, a woman named Danalynn Recer. At her office in Houston, she told me about one of the first people she tried to save from execution: a man named Eddie Ellis. It was 1992, and Recer was a law student volunteering for the Texas Resource Center, a kind of emergency triage team for death-row appeals. This small team of lawyers was trying to stop a deluge of execution dates. (Greg Wiercioch, the lead lawyer we feature in “The Last 12 Weeks,” worked at the center — the world of death penalty lawyers is small!) Recer’s bosses were working to stop the execution of Ellis, who had been convicted of the 1983 murder of an elderly woman. She had been found strangled in her bathtub as part of a series of murders known locally as the “bathtub slayings.”
One evening, just days before the execution date, Recer’s office received a tip about the case. The lawyers had just heard about a possible witness, a woman who might have some relevant information. They didn’t put much stock in it, but they sent Recer to look into it, just in case. The tip was to go look for a woman: the widow of a man named Pablo Alonzo. Recer found the widow, and she made a shocking claim: She said that Pablo, who had died the year before, had confessed to killing the elderly woman himself. The widow told Recer that when Pablo was dying in the hospital, he had written out a confession. The widow didn’t know where she’d put it, so Recer helped her search, first in her home and then in a storage locker. In a bag of mildewed papers, they found a handwritten note in broken English: “I killed the poor woman that Eddie blame for,” it read. “Only God will fine a place for forgiveness I hope he well forgive me because I know you won’t.”
“I’m thinking ‘Oh my God, it’s over,’” Recer told me, comparing it to a moment in an imagined movie, when Barbra Streisand “starts singing and the gates of the jail open up and it’s blue skies forever.” Recer brought the note back to the rest of the legal team, who raced to file it in court. Prosecutors fought back, arguing that there was no proof that the other man had actually written the note, and insinuating that it was fabricated. A series of judges agreed. One of them even accused the defense of trying to “sabotage the efficient administration of justice.” A little after midnight on March 3, 1992, Ellis was executed. He called the prosecutors “sorry sons of bitches” and proclaimed his innocence until the end. Afterward, The New York Times ran a story featuring one of the defense lawyers sounding pretty … well, defensive. “We did not make this up,” said Mandy Welch of the Texas Resource Center. “If we had known about it, we would not have waited until an execution date to bring it up.” Welch’s quote, I knew, was in response to a common accusation lobbied against capital defense lawyers: that all their last-minute scrambling is intentional. According to their critics, these lawyers wait until the last minute before an execution to deliver shaky evidence in order to manipulate the courts into panicking, which ends up stopping executions that were actually just and constitutional.
I have been hearing that argument for years, along with defense lawyers’ insistence that the real problem is a broken system, in which they don’t have the resources to fully investigate cases until it’s an emergency. I never felt like I had a good handle on the truth, because, for all my reporting, I didn’t really know what exactly these lawyers spend their time doing in the months before an execution. So, when David Wood’s lawyer, Greg, emailed me in November 2024 — a few months before Wood’s execution date — and asked me to write about the case, I remembered the Eddie Ellis story: How evidence of his innocence was found at the very last minute, and how he had been executed anyway. I wondered, ‘Is this really how it is?’ The story made me realize that the only way to really understand a case like this was to be there as it played out. So I asked Greg if he’d let me watch him try to save his client’s life.
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