Many defense lawyers are naturally cagey. They work in a pressure cooker, protecting their clients’ rights while fighting for the best possible outcome. And arguably, the stakes can’t get any higher than trying to save a client’s life.
So no, defense lawyers don’t usually invite journalists into strategy meetings.
But that’s what happened when Marshall Project reporter Maurice Chammah and Serial Productions senior producer Alvin Melathe spent the final few months before a Texas execution embedded with a capital defense team.
By the end, the lawyers were recording their own phone calls and sending them to the journalists.
The resulting podcast, “The Last 12 Weeks,” offers a rare look inside capital defense work and the reporting decisions journalists face when they receive unusual access to sources whose work could determine whether someone lives or dies.
“The idea was, it would be nice if we could somehow get inside of the machine—inside of a death penalty case, in that final run—to see for ourselves what’s going on here." Melathe recalled. “What exactly is the work? Why does it take so long for some of these allegations to come to light?”
The idea for the podcast series began with a simple question. What happens in the stretch of time right before an execution?
Melathe said the public tends to see a flurry of articles and celebrity videos (often from Kim Kardashian, an advocate against the death penalty) in the 72- to 48-hour window before an execution. But they wanted to understand what happened behind the scenes.
The Serial team approached Chammah, who had written about mitigation experts for The Marshall Project. They floated what Melathe called their “pie-in-the-sky idea” for a podcast: What if they could follow around death penalty lawyers racing a ticking clock?
“My initial reaction was that that would be almost impossible — not practically, but because lawyers were unlikely to agree,” Chammah said. “I had written a book about the death penalty and interviewed lots of defense lawyers, and (I’d) seen that they had just been very, very appropriately cagey about their work.”
Then in November, an email changed everything. Defense lawyer Greg Wiercioch reached out to Chammah to see if he’d be interested in covering the case of his client, David Wood, often referred to as the Desert Killer. Convicted of a string of murders in El Paso, Wood had been sitting on death row for more than three decades.
Looking back, Chammah said the timing was shockingly serendipitous. Wiercioch had declined interviews with Chammah in the past, but the two had always maintained a polite rapport.
“I hoped that past reporting that I had done paved the way for a ‘yes’ in this scenario, that they could trust that we would do an ethical and careful job,” Chammah said. “So that’s how it developed.”
Chammah told the Serial crew about the email. Wiercioch and his team were not immediately sold on the idea of letting a group of journalists follow them as they raced against the clock to stop Wood’s execution. It took some negotiating.
With a few months left before the execution, Melathe didn’t think there would be time for a thorough investigation into the claims the lawyers made about Wood’s innocence.
“But we could follow them around,” he said. “That was something that we were actually capable of doing.”
That access would form the backbone of the five-part podcast series, produced by The Marshall Project, Serial Productions and The New York Times. Chammah and Melathe spent a considerable amount of time shadowing members of the capital defense team as they knocked on doors looking for any morsel of information that could help their clients. They sat in on Zoom meetings, listening as the lawyers strategized their next move and shared updates.
“It’s really remarkable the sort of front-row seat that we get,” said Jen Guerra, supervising editor at Serial who served as lead editor on “The Last 12 Weeks.” “I had not seen that level of access before.”
Melathe kept meticulous records of the calls the lawyers filled them in on. “You should see my spreadsheet for the story,” he said. One entry, for example, would have up to seven different phone calls Wiercioch had with his younger colleague Jeremy Schepers.
“They were just recording it on their iPhone and sending it to us, just like without us really asking. So it’s like an incredible amount of access. I’ve never had that happen before in my career.”
The access translated into an unusually rich reporting record.
“There’s so much tape, and so much of it is all unfolding in real time, so as an editor that was very exciting to work with and to see,” she said. “And of course the lawyers had given us access to their team meetings, so we got to hear them strategize, and that was really exciting to figure out how to use that in the podcast.”
Chammah said access for journalists is always talked about in simple terms: You either get it or you don’t. But he sees it as much more fluid.
“I have found that the best access I’ve ever gotten has often depended on developing trust and comfort over the course of months or years,” he said. “And although Greg himself had not let me do this before, or even given me an interview before, I was not an unknown quantity to him. I was not coming to him as a completely new name, and I think that that probably helped smooth the situation and get us that access.”
But that extraordinary access brought many ethical considerations. They began before they hit record. First, Wiercioch and his team, which included lawyer Naomi Fenwick, had to make sure Wood was on board. He was.
Then came what Melathe described as “micro moments”—how he and Chammah would deal with not being in the way of the story and influencing events.
“We tried to be as careful as possible,” Melathe said. “The truth is, what we really wanted to see was them doing their work to the extent possible.”
Observing the lawyers initially approach potential witnesses was part of the story.
“How do you door-knock somebody and try and get them to give you information that will help save your client’s life? That is a real part of their jobs, and that’s something that we kind of needed in order to tell their story,” Melathe said.
But Chammah said the journalists didn’t want to be the reason why someone didn’t talk to the lawyers.
“You don’t want to taint the situation with your involvement,” he said, “and so we talked a lot to the lawyers about how to do this. And it ended up honestly being a different conversation for literally every scenario.”
They decided on a simple approach. They would not record when lawyers first approached witnesses. The lawyer would make first contact, and then either Melathe would introduce himself as a journalist with the Times, or Maurice would introduce himself as a journalist working with Serial. They would explain what they were doing, and then ask if it’d be OK to record.
Sometimes people said no. Sometimes they said yes.
“I think that, in a lot of these cases, it’s such a weird thing to be approached by a lawyer in this specific way about a death penalty case, that me being there as a journalist, trailing behind them, is like the second weirdest thing that’s happening to them that day,” Melathe said. “So it doesn’t feel like all that crazy to them. So a lot of people just said ‘yes’ for that reason.”
At the most basic level, Chammah said, they did not want to interfere with the defense team’s work. In Zoom meetings, they could sit and remain unobtrusive. The much trickier scenarios occurred in the field. A few times, the journalists were allowed to be in the room, but the witness didn’t want a microphone in their face.
Chammah said he and Melathe often returned to sources later to make sure sources were still comfortable. They also recognized that the lawyers’ ethical obligations weren’t the same as their own. While defense attorneys didn’t need to seek comment from people accused in court filings, the journalists did.
On a few occasions, they approached people named as alternate suspects in the El Paso murders, provided them with a full accounting of how they were being framed in the course of the defense filings, and asked them for comment.
“We felt like because journalism and capital defense law are different fields, we have different ethical rules,” Chammah said. “Their first obligation is to their client. Our first obligation is to the public, and then it’s also to all of our sources, in some regards.”
Chammah said they decided early that they couldn’t just reflect the perspective of the defense lawyers.
“They’ll be the narrative spine of the story we’re telling because they’re the most active players, but we’re going to go to all of these other participants in the case and seek interviews with them. And that’s what we did.”
The reporting continued through to the final week before Wood’s scheduled execution in March 2025. Less than 48 hours before he was scheduled to be executed, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals granted a stay of execution. Melathe was with members of the defense team when the ruling came down.
“This was the moment all the lawyers had been working toward for the entire time Maurice and I had been following them,” Melathe narrates in the fifth and final episode. “And they’re still a little stunned that it’s happened.”
Chammah said listeners of “The Last 12 Weeks” will come away with an intimate understanding of what it’s like to do one of the legal system’s hardest jobs.
“I think people will kind of get a deeper sense of the death penalty’s cost in the world by getting this up close to all of the emotions that surround an upcoming execution date,” he said. “And then I think I’ll also gather an appreciation for how arbitrary the system is, in the sense that whether David Wood was going to get executed seemed to turn on so many little moments that could have gone one way or another, and will ultimately never always know exactly what moment made the difference.”
Throughout the reporting, Chammah said, there were little moments where he thought, “This could change everything.” And had they spent the last hour a little differently, the outcome might have changed.
“There’s this kind of butterfly effect to all of this that I think will make people look at the death penalty with a lot more, I would hope, humility and carefulness.”
Source: poynter.org, Amaris Castillo, July 22, 2026
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
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