Oklahoma Moves To Execute Tremane Wood

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond asked a court Thursday to schedule Tremane Wood’s execution on or after Sept. 11 this year. The filing comes weeks after a post-conviction evidentiary hearing yielded compelling proof of what Tremane and his legal team had insisted for years: His death sentence was the result of an unfair trial.

Tremane, the subject of a HuffPost investigation last year, was sentenced to death in 2004 for a homicide he has consistently maintained he did not commit. His brother, who admitted to the killing, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, a sentencing disparity that Tremane’s current lawyers attribute to the quality of legal representation afforded to each brother at trial. It is also a stark example of the inconsistent outcomes of felony-murder statutes, which state that anyone involved in a felony that leads to a death can be held criminally responsible for that death, regardless of intent or involvement in the actual killing.

The evidentiary hearing, held over three days in April, revealed that prosecutors had misled jurors about the incentives offered to two of their trial witnesses in exchange for their testimony. The revelation offered the possibility that Tremane, who has argued for decades that he was deprived a fair trial on multiple grounds, might finally get a new trial. Instead, District Court Judge Susan Stallings adopted the state’s proposed factual findings and legal conclusions — including typos in the state’s brief — and denied Tremane request for relief.

Tremane is appealing the judge’s decision and will pursue a request for clemency from the governor. On Friday, Tremane asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to block the execution until his pending claims were resolved. But absent intervention from the courts or Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R), he faces execution later this year.

Tremane grew up in Guthrie, Oklahoma, the youngest of three boys. Some of his earliest memories are of his father beating his mother and threatening to kill her. When Tremane and his brothers tried to protect their mom, their father beat them, too. Because their father was a cop, their mom didn’t feel that she could turn to the police for help.

“He has handcuffed me and dragged me down the highway on the outside of the car,” Tremane’s mother, Linda Wood, told HuffPost last year. “He has beaten me to the point where you couldn’t even tell what I looked like, knocked my teeth out, broke my nose, broke my bones, and then wouldn’t let me even get any medical help. He’s tied me up and beat me with an extension cord. I got hit in the head with a pipe wrench.”

“It’s really hard to parent your kids when you’re in survival mode,” Linda said in a video prepared for Tremane’s clemency application. “There’s a saying that says everybody dies but not everybody lives. And we weren’t living, we were just surviving. Just trying to stay alive for another day.”

Both Tremane and his next-eldest brother, Zjaiton Wood, were sexually abused by a male neighbor, they later told separate psychologists. Zjaiton, who went by Jake, coped with the trauma with drugs and alcohol as a child. He joined a gang when he was 10 or 11, and brought Tremane along soon after.

The brothers’ bond was “beyond bounds,” their eldest brother Andre Wood said in an interview. “I’ve never seen anyone be that loyal to a person. Tremane would follow Jake to the end of the Earth. Tremane just loved his brother. And Jake loved Tremane. And there was nothing that could break that. Nothing.”

“Jake is Tremane’s idol, he would die for Jake,” Linda told a social worker in 1994.

Jake was a violent and increasingly angry kid who lacked impulse control and learned to use his intimidating stature to get what he wanted, Linda said in an interview with HuffPost. She wanted to get him mental health treatment, but they didn’t have health insurance.

Tremane planned to spend New Year’s Eve in 2001 with his cousins, but Jake convinced Tremane to go out with him instead. Jake had recently come home from prison, and after years apart, Tremane was eager to spend time with his brother, he said in an interview last year.

The brothers went to a brewery in Oklahoma City with Jake’s girlfriend, Lanita Bateman, and Tremane’s ex-girlfriend and longtime friend, Brandy Warden. The girls ended up talking with two men from out of town: Ronnie Wipf and Arnold Kleinsasser, who were passing through town on their way to Texas to work on a harvest crew. Ronnie and Arnold grew up in rural Montana in a colony of Hutterites, a religious group similar to the Amish, and had only recently left the colony.

Ronnie suggested the four of them go back to a motel room. Brandy and Lanita didn’t want to go, they would later say, but felt pressure from Jake and Tremane to get money from the naive out-of-towners. Once at the motel, they negotiated a price of $210 in exchange for sex. But before anything happened, Jake and Tremane knocked on the door, wearing masks, long trench coats and leather gloves. When Ronnie opened the door, the girls burst out and the brothers moved in, one armed with a gun and the other with a knife.

Arnold gave one of the masked men the $68 in his wallet, but Ronnie fought back. Arnold escaped, hiding in a dumpster for hours in the January cold. When he made his way back to the motel, a detective told him Ronnie had been fatally stabbed.

That night, Jake told Lanita he had killed someone, although he did not say how, she said in an interview. When Tremane’s cousin, Roshonda Jackson, saw him the next day, he broke down in tears, so distraught that he threw up, she wrote in a 2022 affidavit. “He kept saying he was sorry,” she wrote. “When I asked what was wrong he said, ‘No one was supposed to die!’”

Within a week, Jake, Tremane, Lanita and Brandy were all arrested and charged with first-degree felony murder, robbery with firearms, and conspiracy to commit robbery with a dangerous weapon. The state sought lengthy prison sentences for the women — who had fled by the time of the killing — and death sentences for Jake and Tremane.

Brandy, who had three kids, including a son with Tremane, agreed to plead guilty to reduced charges and testify for the state in exchange for a shorter sentence. She took the deal, she said at the time, because she wanted to go home to her kids one day. She did not respond to interview requests.

Lanita, who had only known Jake for a few months, refused to cooperate with the state, citing an unwillingness to help send someone to death row. She was sentenced to life plus 101 years, with the chance to seek parole in 2040, when she will be 58 years old.

Jake was appointed a team of three experienced capital defense lawyers from the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System, who thoroughly investigated the crime, as well as mitigating circumstances, in order to develop their defense strategy.

Because it would be a conflict of interest for the office to represent both brothers, Tremane was appointed a private attorney named Johnny Albert. Albert was allowed to bill up to $20,000 for his work on the case; his co-counsel was allowed an additional $5,000. At the time, defense attorneys for people facing the death penalty worked an average of 3,557 hours per trial. Had Albert worked that much on the case, he would have earned less than $6 an hour.

Ultimately, Albert billed just two hours of work outside of court appearances in Tremane’s case. He never visited his client, and did not answer phone calls from Tremane or his family. He failed to identify evidence that Tremane was not the one who killed Ronnie, or present a compelling picture of Tremane’s abusive childhood and Jake’s sway over him. Critically, he did not reach out to Lanita, who heard Jake admit to the killing. Lanita would have been willing to testify in support of Tremane, she wrote in a 2011 declaration.

Albert also neglected to prepare Jake, who insisted on testifying at Tremane’s trial ahead of his own. During the trial, Jake testified that he was the one who stabbed Ronnie, but he also falsely claimed that Tremane was not present at the robbery — a claim that lacked credibility after Brandy, the mother of Tremane’s child, testified that Tremane was present.

“I was hoping to not get the death penalty, but I had no faith because Johnny wasn’t prepared,” Tremane said in an interview last year. “I knew this was a wrap.”

Watching the trial unfold was agonizing, his brother Andre said. “I’m sitting there, looking at my mom, going, ‘This is the fucking lawyer?’” he said. “I wanted to get up and say, ‘Can I represent my brother? Because this asshole has no clue what he’s doing.’”

Throughout the trial, prosecutors argued that Tremane was the actual killer — a version of events they would later directly contradict at Jake’s trial. They didn’t need to prove Tremane killed Ronnie in order to secure a guilty verdict or a death sentence, but it was part of their strategy in convincing the jury that Tremane represented the worst-of-the-worst offender. Brandy became their key witness. Although she had fled before Ronnie was stabbed, she testified that Tremane and Jake were the two masked intruders at the motel, and that the smaller of the brothers, Tremane, was holding the knife.

In 2006, Albert was arrested for repeatedly failing to appear in court for another case. He admitted to struggling with substance abuse, and began inpatient drug and alcohol treatment. The Oklahoma Bar Association charged him with 11 counts of professional misconduct after clients complained that he neglected their cases. He admitted to the allegations, and his law license was suspended for 14 months.

Years later, he passed along an apology note to Tremane, scribbled on the back of his business card. “Treman Im sorry for everything in the past. You got me at a bad time and its not your fault. Its mine. I will do anything I can to help you.”

Two of Albert’s former clients have had their death sentences tossed after a trial court found that they had received ineffective assistance of counsel. But appellate courts have refused to grant Tremane the same relief.

Initially, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals found that Albert’s decline began shortly after Tremane’s trial. Tremane then presented affidavits from two of Albert’s former clients who said they gave him drugs in exchange for legal services and saw him use cocaine frequently, starting well before Tremane’s trial. But the OCCA again denied relief, this time on procedural grounds. His petition was too similar to his previous ineffective assistance of counsel claim and he should have presented this evidence earlier, the court wrote.

In 2019, the Supreme Court declined to review the lower court’s denial of Tremane’s habeas petition, which made him eligible for execution. Months later, Jake died by suicide in his prison cell.

Prosecutors repeatedly told jurors that Brandy would spend 45 years in prison as a result of her plea deal. But her sentence was later modified to 35 years, and with “good time” credit, she was released after 12 years.

During the recent evidentiary hearing, former Oklahoma County Assistant District Attorney George Burnett, one of the prosecutors in Tremane’s trial, testified that the prosecution’s plea agreement with Brandy represented the full extent of their deal. Federal public defender Amanda Bass Castro Alves, one of Tremane’s current lawyers, confronted Burnett with evidence that his plea agreement with another witness for the prosecution did not reflect the fact the prosecutors dismissed and downgraded the witness’ pending felonies after Tremane was sentenced to death.

Burnett then testified that the full scope of the state’s agreement with Brandy was documented in a “memorandum,” not in the plea agreement. After learning that neither lawyers for Tremane or the state had seen the memorandum, the judge obtained a copy from Warden’s case file at the Oklahoma County Public Defender’s office. It clearly showed, contrary to prosecutors’ claims at Tremane’s trial, that Brandy would receive a sentence of 35 years in exchange for testifying against her co-defendants.

Asked in the evidentiary hearing why he told jurors Brandy would spend 45 years in prison, Burnett said he “made a mistake probably.”

“Never underestimate my — my ability to say something stupid to a jury,” Burnett said.

At the time, Brandy was serving a deferred felony sentence for an unrelated crime, meaning her sentencing was delayed and her case could be dismissed upon successful completion of probation. After she was charged with felony murder, probation officials filed a violation report, recommending “acceleration” of her deferred sentence. But Payne County Assistant District Attorney Tom Lee opted to “hold off,” he wrote in a note on the report.

Lee testified at the evidentiary hearing that he had a standing agreement with the Oklahoma County district attorney’s office to pursue or forgo accelerating deferred sentences to felony convictions to assist with prosecutions. He said he did not speak with anyone from the Oklahoma County DA’s office before deciding not to pursue Brandy’s sentence — but he also admitted he didn’t remember writing the note about “hold[ing] off.”

Had Brandy’s felony been accelerated, she would not have been eligible for a sentence modification from 45 to 35 years, Bass Castro Alves wrote in a recent court filing. This arrangement allowed prosecutors to emphasize Brandy’s lack of a felony record to jurors.

“The prosecutors’ suppression of their full agreement with Warden undermined [Tremane’s] defense and misled the jury by depriving it of information critical to jurors’ assessment of Warden’s truthfulness, credibility, and motivations for testifying to the story she told the jury,” Bass Castro Alves wrote in her proposed factual findings and legal conclusions.

“It allowed prosecutors to convincingly argue in closing at the first stage that Warden was not some ‘big conspirator’ but rather was a girl who ‘know[s] one rule, you do what Termane told you to do,’” she continued. (Tremane’s name is misspelled as “Termane” throughout his trial records.)

In their proposed factual findings and legal conclusions, the state denied any prosecutorial misconduct at trial and claimed that even if there was an undisclosed deal, Tremane had failed to prove that it would have resulted in a different outcome at trial.

The judge signed the state’s recommended findings verbatim.