Alvin Maleth

Marcia had spent most of those years anxious to see David Wood pay for it.

She'd packed her bag and was ready to leave for Huntsville for the execution when she got the call about the stay.

Marcia then calls me, actually, and asks if I've heard the news yet.

Yeah.

There's some real emotional whiplash here, going from the defense team's celebration to Marsha's fury.

This is the second time she's prepared for this moment, to finally keep her promise to her daughter, only for something to get in the way.

Four and a half months go by before we hear anything else about David Wood's case from the CCA.

The judges had been silent about what exactly the next steps were here and which of the lawyers' claims they actually found persuasive.

In July 2025, the defense team finally gets an answer.

The judges write that all of their claims should be evaluated by a lower court, which means a hearing in front of a judge in El Paso.

It turns out the defense team was right to feel some optimism around the new mysterious CCA judges.

One of them goes even further than the rest of the court and writes, quote, this case should have been resolved one way or the other long ago and likely would have had a DNA test been ordered.

He's just one of nine judges, so he can't force the issue on his own.

But it does pave the way for an El Paso judge to order the testing that Greg has wanted for more than a decade now.

This ruling is about as good as it gets for the defense team.

And the day it comes out, Alvin and I hop on the phone with Greg and Jeremy to talk about it.

For a case that had such long odds when we started following these lawyers around, I was fully prepared for a bit of gloating here.

But I wasn't exactly hearing them take a victory lap.

Greg had spent all of those weeks we were with him cultivating Charlie Brown optimism.

But now that he'd won, it felt like he was finally getting his bearings.