WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The U.S. Supreme Court last week refused to immediately consider the appeal of condemned child-killer James Edward Wood.
Without comment, the high court returned the case to Idaho, where Wood has run out of state appeals but potentially still has years of appeals through the federal district and intermediate appellate courts.Just two days before Christmas, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor stayed Wood's scheduled Dec. 30 execution until the entire court could consider whether to review the case before it made its way through the lower federal courts.
The Idaho Supreme Court has three times upheld the somewhat unusual circumstances surrounding Wood's conviction as well as his death sentence for the 1993 slaying of 11-year-old Pocatello newspaper carrier Jeralee Underwood.
Wood, 51, pleaded guilty within a matter of weeks to the July, molestation, murder and subsequent sexual mutilation and dismemberment of the girl he had kidnapped while she was collecting from customers on her newspaper route. He threw the body into the Snake River near Idaho Falls.
In sentencing him, then-6th District Judge B. Lynn Winmill -- now a federal judge -- called Wood "a coldblooded, pitiless slayer," citing Wood's 30-year trail of crime that covered at least six states, one and possibly three other murders in Louisiana, an attempted murder and as many as seven rapes.
Wood initially refused to appeal and demanded execution, but he was quickly persuaded to fight the conviction and sentence.
In upholding the guilty plea, the Idaho Supreme Court agreed that there were some procedural problems with the case, but they had no effect on the outcome. It rejected Wood's challenges to a plea-bargain meeting he was not present for, alleged conflicts of interest on the part of the judge and his lawyer who knew the girl's family and that his lawyer tried to use their Mormon religious belief in blood atonement to secure forgiveness to plead guilty and accept a death sentence.