David Wood has twelve weeks to live. He has been on death row since 1993 for multiple murders in El Paso, and already having had one execution date stayed, another is barreling down on him. Still, his lawyers have hope; there is an eclectic selection of avenues to pursue for their final appeal – some are promising, some are long shots. In The Last 12 Weeks, the latest joint production from Serial and The New York Times, journalist Maurice Chammah and producer Alvin Melathe embed with Wood’s legal team as they chase down potentially life-saving leads.
There’s a messiness to the structure of The Last 12 Weeks which can be confusing. Recaps at the top of each episode would have been helpful. But this format is also useful in underlining the chaos these lawyers face as their client’s execution date looms. With the hourglass running down and a life on the line, they must decide where they put their increasingly finite resources. They can’t afford to waste time, but they won’t know if a lead is a waste of time until they’ve investigated it. Quite the Catch-22.
The Last 12 Weeks takes us along with the legal team as they meet the people who profess to have potentially exculpatory information. In conversations with Chammah and Melathe, we hear the lawyers think through this evidence, assess its reliability, and decide how likely it is to be helpful. Nothing they hear is straightforward. Sometimes a witness isn’t consistent; sometimes there’s someone else on the record claiming the opposite just as forcefully. Still, even the most dubious lead could have potential, as becomes clear in the show’s final episode.
Serial has co-produced The Last 12 Weeks with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization centered on inequalities within the legal system. You might think that with such bonafides, the podcast would be quite ardent in its proclamation of Wood’s innocence. Interestingly, the discussion is far more ambiguous.
Chammah doesn’t talk to Wood until the penultimate episode, but even then, the first half is centered on a distressing interview with a previous victim, a crime that Wood was convicted for in a separate and undisputed case.
That’s the thing about Wood: to quote Chammah, “While he’s possibly innocent of the murders, he’s certainly not sympathetic.” Wood has always maintained he had nothing to do with the killings, but he was previously convicted of multiple rape and sexual assault charges, including one of a 12-year-old girl. No amount of remorse would atone for such heinous acts. Nevertheless, when Chammah does talk to Wood about them, it’s notable how irritable and unrepentant he sounds. To some extent, Wood's attitude could be attributed to the short interview time that the prison allowed – a mere hour – and Wood’s understandable focus is to discuss his innocence of the crime he’s currently being prosecuted for. Still, it’s not a good look.
Interestingly, a line of inquiry that Wood's lawyers pursue is that being such a profoundly unsympathetic character is what made him a perfect patsy for the murders, which started very shortly after he finished a jail term for rape. When someone’s done awful things, it’s not hard to believe they’d do other awful things.
The fact that it is so difficult to feel pity for Wood is really what makes The Last 12 Weeks such an unusual podcast of its type. If you compare him to Adnan Syed, the subject of Serial's first season who had no prior convictions and a much warmer demeanor, then this series has a very different question at its heart. Syed's ambiguous guilt was part of the emotional hook of Serial. When someone likeable is on death row for something they clearly didn’t do, it’s easy to care about their fate. It’s far, far harder when there’s less clarity as to their culpability, and if they have prior terrible deeds to their name. Yet, coolly and legally, it shouldn’t matter.
No one should be in prison for something they didn’t do, let alone put to death for it.
The Last 12 Weeks is an eye-opening look into the justice system, and how lives can – but shouldn’t – hang on last-minute legal luck. More compelling than that, however, is the challenging, thought-provoking manner in which it weighs our sympathies against our values.
