The Oklahoma Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 3-2 Wednesday to recommend the governor spare the life of a man scheduled to be executed next week for the 2001 stabbing of a man during a botched robbery.
Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt must now consider whether to commute the death sentence of Tremaine Wood, 46, to life in prison. Stitt was granted clemency only once during his seven years in office Death row inmate Julius Jones in 2021. He has rejected clemency recommendations in four other cases. A total of 16 men were executed during Stitt’s time in office. His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the council’s decision.
Wood is scheduled to receive a lethal injection next week for his role in the killing of Ronnie Wipf, a 19-year-old migrant farm worker from Montana, during an attempted robbery at a north Oklahoma City hotel on New Year’s Eve in 2001.
Wood’s lawyers do not deny that he participated in the robbery, but they maintain that it was his brother, Zigton Wood, who actually stabbed Wipf. Treman Wood’s attorney, Amanda Bass Castro Alves, said that Zigton Wood, who was sentenced to life in prison without parole for Wipf’s death and died in prison in 2019, admitted to several people that he killed Wipf.
Castro Alves said Treman Wood had an ineffective trial attorney and was drinking heavily at the time and did little to no work on the case. She also said prosecutors concealed from jurors the benefits witnesses received in exchange for testifying.
“Tremani’s death sentence is the product of a fundamentally broken system,” Castro Alves said.
Prosecutors portrayed Wood as a dangerous criminal who continued to participate in gang activity and commit crimes while in prison, including buying and selling drugs, using contraband cell phones, and ordering attacks on other inmates.
“Even within the confines of the maximum security prison, Treman Wood continued to manipulate, exploit, and harm others,” District Attorney Gentner Drummond said.
Wood, who testified before the committee via video link from Oklahoma State Prison in McAlester, accepted responsibility for his prison misconduct and participation in the robbery, but denied being the one who killed Wipf.
“I’m not a monster. I’m not a killer. I never was and never have been,” Wood said.
“Not a day goes by in my life that I don’t think about Ronnie and how much his mother and father are suffering because they don’t have their son anymore.”