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We Will All Be Murderers on that Day…
Today in Huntsville, Texas Jeff Wood was going to be strapped down, and poison was going to be injected into his body. Today Jeff Wood was going to die because Daniel Reneau shot and killed Kriss Keeran. Jeff Wood’s execution has been postponed, but the basic truth is that Jeff Wood is going to be executed for a murder that he did not commit a murder that was committed by a man that was executed six years ago. On that day we are all murderers.
This case enters the murky waters of the moral justifications of capital punishment, the imperfect justice system that sentences criminals to death, and the public’s overriding emotions of vengeance and apathy.
Jeff Wood is guilty of committing a crime. Daniel Reneau and Wood planned and conspired to rob a Kerrville, Texas Goldstar Texaco convenience store in 1996. Before the robbery, Reneau and Wood approached Kriss Keeran and another employee about staging a fake robbery. However, Reneau and Wood made the decision to rob the convenience store after the plan to stage a fake robbery fell through. During the process of robbing the convenience store of $11,000 in cash and checks Reneau shot and killed Kriss Keeran. Wood’s attorneys have maintained that Wood was not aware that Reneau was armed; also Wood was in a vehicle outside the convenience store during the homicide. Wood is guilty of robbery, but not murder.
Despite not committing the murder Wood was sentence to death through the Texas “law of parties,” as law that is in place in 24 of 36 American death penalty states. This law allows for the prosecution of accomplices, and can be interpreted to suggest that the presence of an accomplice can embolden a criminal to kill. The United State Supreme Court has handed down two separate rulings on cases such as this, and in one case has ruled against and in one case has ruled in favor of the same type of law applied in different ways.
There are also questions about Wood’s mental health. Wood was initially found by a jury to be mentally incompetent to stand trial, however, after being hospitalized a second jury found Wood to be mentally competent to stand trial. During Wood’s trial he attempted fire his lawyers before the penalty phase, which the judge denied. However, Wood instructed his lawyers not call witnesses and not to cross-examine prosecution witnesses. Recently Wood has communicated to his lawyers that he “believed the trial judge in his case was corrupt but would accept a $100,000 bribe and then deport him to Norway where he could live with his wife” and that “the government will pay him $50,000 a year once he's released and that he's willing to give that money to the judge.”
This execution does nothing but create more victims and adds to the anguish that the murder victim’s family has already gone through. According to the Kerrville Daily Times when the store manager was asked about the crime and how he felt about the executions he said “I don’t know how I feel about execution. We’ve already had one death. I don’t know if another death solves the problem.”
During the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice hearings on the fairness of the death penalty the sister of a murder victim, spoke out against the death penalty:
“I understand that this sense of revenge is a very legitimate emotion, but it is not a legitimate basis for public policy. And I think that we denigrate our own noble ideals when we use revenge and we use the public fist for the purpose of killing our fellow human beings when that really is not going to solve the problem. It’s certainly not going to bring back the loved ones that people have lost, and I just am amazed that we are still having this conversation in the 21st Century, that we just haven’t gotten smarter about really addressing the causes of crime instead of trying to treat the symptoms.”