Wood Case Stirs Up Debate Over Death Penalty

by ABC-7 Reporter Darren Hunt

EL PASO, Texas — The stay of David Leonard Wood’s execution has left many considering their positions on the death penalty.

Wood was convicted in Dallas in 1992 of killing and burying six girls and young women in the Northeast El Paso desert.

Now those involved in the case will have to wait even longer before finding out what will happen to Wood.

ABC-7 spoke to Dolph Quijano, an attorney who opposes the death penalty in this case, and others who support it. Either way, the death penalty seems to be a way of life in Texas.

“You worry about everything you do in a capital case. You worry if you don’t say the right word, your client is going to die,” Quijano said.

Quijano was part of Wood’s defense team. He has tried eight death penalty cases in his career and avoided the death penalty for his clients all but once.

“This is like a smudge as far as I’m concerned. This person’s life is going to be taken and I had a part in it. It’s not a happy thing. It’s a sad commentary on our society when we the people let the government kill.”

Others, like Paul Strelzin, the former principal at H.E. Charles Junior High, where Wood victim Desiree Wheatley went to school, feel differently.

“The only problem I see with it, it takes almost 20 years and costs a lot of money. I thought he should have been put to death long before this,” Strelzin said.

John Guerrero was a detective on the Wood case.

“If I had caught him, I would have beat the hell out of him,” he said.

Charles Doyle is a member of El Pasoans Against the Death Penalty.

“We pray to God he have mercy on their souls, pray for the victims of crime and that he help us contend with the vengeance in this world.”

Doyle, a native New Yorker who moved to El Paso five years ago, believes Texas has it all wrong in how it deals with its worst criminals.

“We do not think by killing somebody, you’re gonna lessen the amount of murders. I think the whole country and the world is flabbergasted about what happens in Texas.”

Since 1982, when the death penalty was reinstated, Texas has executed 439 inmates by lethal injection, including three women. The most in a year was 40 in 2008. Last year the state executed 18 people. So far this year, 16 people have been executed.

Doyle says it would have been cheaper to keep those inmates alive.

“About 2.5 million to execute somebody in Texas. That’s enough to put somebody in for life without parole three times over.”

Doyle also questions whether it helps the victims’ families. “I feel badly that people think they are going to find relief from this. I don’t think that happens.”

Click here for more on the Wood case.