“The Last 12 Weeks,” a new five-part podcast from The Marshall Project, Serial Productions, and The New York Times, takes listeners behind the scenes as a group of lawyers races against the clock to try to stop David Wood’s execution.
In 1992, Wood was convicted of murdering multiple young women and girls and burying them in the desert outside of El Paso, earning him the nickname “The Desert Killer.” He’s been on death row ever since.
More than 30 years later, his lawyers have just a few months to argue his innocence.
Hosted by Maurice Chammah, a journalist for The Marshall Project and a leading authority on the death penalty, the series focuses on the high stakes and at times bizarre work involved in trying to halt an execution. With extraordinary access to a death penalty case in its final stretch, the series will bring listeners into the room with the lawyers as the clock ticks down. Chammah and producer Alvin Melathe follow members of the defense team as they look for alternate suspects, try to find new evidence to poke holes in the case, and track down hard-to-find witnesses.
In the end, will the lawyers’ efforts be enough to persuade a deeply skeptical court system — and stop an execution three decades in the making?
“Death penalty lawyers are a secretive bunch, so this was a once-in-a-career opportunity to see them in action,” says Chammah. “Then it became a once-in-a-lifetime story about a convicted serial killer possibly being innocent, and I got to tell that story with the most cinematic and thoughtful storytellers around.”
“This podcast represents everything The Marshall Project stands for — ambitious, unflinching storytelling driven by access that no one else has,” said Jennifer Peter, Editor in Chief of The Marshall Project. “Together with Serial Productions and The New York Times, we've built something rare: a series that follows every step of the road to an execution, bringing listeners closer than ever to our legal system's most irreversible act.”
All five episodes of “The Last 12 Weeks” will be available on Thursday, June 18, wherever you get your podcasts.
The podcast’s release also coincides with the 50th anniversary of the modern death penalty, and both outlets will be producing stories based on newly released data about more than 9,000 death sentences, examining what they reveal about the state of capital punishment.
Maurice Chammah is a staff writer at The Marshall Project and author of “Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty.” He was on a team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and hosted the award-winning 2021 Marshall Project podcast “Just Say You’re Sorry.” He currently writes the Marshall Project newsletter “Redemption Songs,” on the music of mass incarceration.
Alvin Melathe is a senior producer at Serial Productions. He’s produced stories and shows at This American Life, Freakonomics, Slate and The Atlantic, where he co-reported and produced the 2021 Peabody Award-winning podcast series “Floodlines.”
The Marshall Project is a nonpartisan, independent nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. justice system. We drive impact through journalism, helping to make the system more fair, effective, transparent, and humane. Our work has driven a meaningful impact on the criminal justice system both nationally and locally, prompting federal investigations; the installation of cameras installed in prisons to prevent abuse; and the cancellation of contracts with corrupt, for-profit prison companies. We also reach an incarcerated audience through tablets that serve more than 1,800 prisons and jails across the United States. Since our founding in 2014, we have won more than 100 top journalism honors, including two Pulitzer Prizes.
Serial Productions, a New York Times company, creates narrative podcasts whose quality and innovation have transformed the medium. Serial Productions is the maker of the award-winning blockbuster podcasts “Serial” and “S-Town,” with more than 743 million total downloads. In previous seasons, “Serial” investigated a murder case, told the story of the court-martial of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, spent a year inside Cleveland’s criminal courts and went to the Guantánamo detention camp.