If it goes as scheduled, Texas will execute Jeff Wood next Wednesday for the 1996 murder of a gas station store clerk. The problem: It was a murder Wood did not commit.
Wood is scheduled to be executed on August 24 for the murder of Kriss Keeran, a store clerk at a Texaco gas station. This is despite the fact Wood was in his car when Keeran was shot, and may have not known about the shooting until after it was too late.
Wood was in his car while his friend, Danny Reneau, was inside threatening Keeran for the store’s safe. When Keeran refused Reneau’s demands, Reneau shot him with a handgun.
It was after this shooting when Wood entered the store to help Reneau remove the safe as well as security footage. It is unclear if Wood knew about the
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Tyler, Wood’s family, and others have been trying to stop this execution through petitioning the state Board of Pardons and Paroles.
State Representative Jeff Leach (R–Plano) has been talking with the board and the office of Governor Greg Abbott to prevent Wood’s execution.
“I simply do not believe that Mr. Wood is deserving of the death sentence,” Leach told The Texas Tribune. “I can’t sit quietly by and not say anything.”
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 10 people have been executed for being responsible for a murder they did not commit. Five of those people, like Wood, were executed in Texas.
This does not mean the state has not commuted punishments for defendants like Wood in the past. In 2007, then-Governor Rick Perry granted clemency to Kenneth Foster, who was originally sentenced to death for his role as the driver of a getaway car in a robbery that ended in the death of a law student.
And while Governor Greg Abbott and the Board of Pardons and Parole are being pressured to reconsider Wood’s punishment, state prosecutors have acknowledged that Wood did not kill Keeran. Yet despite this, Wood is sitting on death row for a murder, facing a cruel punishment he does not