Oklahoma Moves To Execute Tremane Wood | EUROtoday

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond requested a court docket Thursday to schedule Tremane Wood’s execution on or after Sept. 11 this 12 months. The submitting comes weeks after a post-conviction evidentiary listening to yielded compelling proof of what Tremane and his authorized workforce had insisted for years: His loss of life sentence was the results of an unfair trial.

Tremane, the topic of a HuffPost investigation final 12 months, was sentenced to loss of life in 2004 for a murder he has persistently maintained he didn’t commit. His brother, who admitted to the killing, was sentenced to life in jail with out the opportunity of parole, a sentencing disparity that Tremane’s present attorneys attribute to the standard of authorized illustration afforded to every brother at trial. It can also be a stark instance of the inconsistent outcomes of felony-murder statutes, which state that anybody concerned in a felony that results in a loss of life could be held criminally liable for that loss of life, no matter intent or involvement within the precise killing.

The evidentiary listening to, held over three days in April, revealed that prosecutors had misled jurors concerning the incentives provided to 2 of their trial witnesses in trade for his or her testimony. The revelation provided the likelihood that Tremane, who has argued for many years that he was disadvantaged a good trial on a number of grounds, would possibly lastly get a brand new trial. Instead, District Court Judge Susan Stallings adopted the state’s proposed factual findings and authorized conclusions — together with typos within the state’s transient — and denied Tremane request for aid.

Tremane is interesting the decide’s determination and can pursue a request for clemency from the governor. On Friday, Tremane requested the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to dam the execution till his pending claims had been resolved. But absent intervention from the courts or Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R), he faces execution later this 12 months.

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

“He has handcuffed me and dragged me down the highway on the outside of the car,” Tremane’s mom, Linda Wood, informed HuffPost final 12 months. “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 mentioned in a video ready for Tremane’s clemency software. “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, had been sexually abused by a male neighbor, they later informed separate psychologists. Zjaiton, who glided by Jake, coped with the trauma with medicine and alcohol as a baby. He joined a gang when he was 10 or 11, and introduced Tremane alongside quickly after.

The brothers’ bond was “beyond bounds,” their eldest brother Andre Wood mentioned 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 informed a social employee in 1994.

Jake was a violent and more and more offended child who lacked impulse management and discovered to make use of his intimidating stature to get what he wished, Linda mentioned in an interview with HuffPost. She wished to get him psychological well being therapy, however they didn’t have medical health insurance.

Tremane deliberate to spend New Year’s Eve in 2001 along with his cousins, however Jake satisfied Tremane to exit with him as an alternative. Jake had lately come house from jail, and after years aside, Tremane was desirous to spend time along with his brother, he mentioned in an interview final 12 months.

The brothers went to a brewery in Oklahoma City with Jake’s girlfriend, Lanita Bateman, and Tremane’s ex-girlfriend and longtime pal, Brandy Warden. The ladies ended up speaking with two males from out of city: Ronnie Wipf and Arnold Kleinsasser, who had been passing by means of city on their solution to Texas to work on a harvest crew. Ronnie and Arnold grew up in rural Montana in a colony of Hutterites, a non secular group much like the Amish, and had solely lately left the colony.

Ronnie prompt the 4 of them return to a motel room. Brandy and Lanita didn’t wish to go, they might later say, however felt strain from Jake and Tremane to get cash from the naive out-of-towners. Once on the motel, they negotiated a worth of $210 in trade for intercourse. But earlier than something occurred, Jake and Tremane knocked on the door, sporting masks, lengthy trench coats and leather-based gloves. When Ronnie opened the door, the ladies burst out and the brothers moved in, one armed with a gun and the opposite with a knife.

Arnold gave one of many masked males the $68 in his pockets, however Ronnie fought again. Arnold escaped, hiding in a dumpster for hours within the January chilly. When he made his approach again to the motel, a detective informed him Ronnie had been fatally stabbed.

That evening, Jake informed Lanita he had killed somebody, though he didn’t say how, she mentioned in an interview. When Tremane’s cousin, Roshonda Jackson, noticed him the subsequent 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 per week, Jake, Tremane, Lanita and Brandy had been all arrested and charged with first-degree felony homicide, theft with firearms, and conspiracy to commit theft with a harmful weapon. The state sought prolonged jail sentences for the ladies — who had fled by the point of the killing — and loss of life sentences for Jake and Tremane.

Brandy, who had three youngsters, together with a son with Tremane, agreed to plead responsible to lowered expenses and testify for the state in trade for a shorter sentence. She took the deal, she mentioned on the time, as a result of she wished to go house to her youngsters someday. She didn’t reply to interview requests.

Lanita, who had solely identified Jake for a couple of months, refused to cooperate with the state, citing an unwillingness to assist ship somebody to loss of life row. She was sentenced to life plus 101 years, with the prospect to hunt parole in 2040, when she might be 58 years outdated.

Jake was appointed a workforce of three skilled capital protection attorneys from the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System, who completely investigated the crime, in addition to mitigating circumstances, in an effort to develop their protection technique.

Because it might be a battle of curiosity for the workplace to symbolize each brothers, Tremane was appointed a personal legal professional named Johnny Albert. Albert was allowed to invoice as much as $20,000 for his work on the case; his co-counsel was allowed a further $5,000. At the time, protection attorneys for folks going through the loss of life penalty labored a mean of three,557 hours per trial. Had Albert labored that a lot on the case, he would have earned lower than $6 an hour.

Ultimately, Albert billed simply two hours of labor exterior of court docket appearances in Tremane’s case. He by no means visited his shopper, and didn’t reply cellphone calls from Tremane or his household. He did not establish proof that Tremane was not the one who killed Ronnie, or current a compelling image of Tremane’s abusive childhood and Jake’s sway over him. Critically, he didn’t attain out to Lanita, who heard Jake admit to the killing. Lanita would have been prepared to testify in assist of Tremane, she wrote in a 2011 declaration.

Albert additionally uncared for to organize Jake, who insisted on testifying at Tremane’s trial forward of his personal. During the trial, Jake testified that he was the one who stabbed Ronnie, however he additionally falsely claimed that Tremane was not current on the theft — a declare that lacked credibility after Brandy, the mom of Tremane’s baby, testified that Tremane was current.

“I was hoping to not get the death penalty, but I had no faith because Johnny wasn’t prepared,” Tremane mentioned in an interview final 12 months. “I knew this was a wrap.”

Watching the trial unfold was agonizing, his brother Andre mentioned. “I’m sitting there, looking at my mom, going, ‘This is the fucking lawyer?’” he mentioned. “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 precise killer — a model of occasions they might later straight contradict at Jake’s trial. They didn’t must show Tremane killed Ronnie in an effort to safe a responsible verdict or a loss of life sentence, however it was a part of their technique in convincing the jury that Tremane represented the worst-of-the-worst offender. Brandy turned their key witness. Although she had fled earlier than Ronnie was stabbed, she testified that Tremane and Jake had been the 2 masked intruders on the motel, and that the smaller of the brothers, Tremane, was holding the knife.

In 2006, Albert was arrested for repeatedly failing to look in court docket for one more case. He admitted to battling substance abuse, and started inpatient drug and alcohol therapy. The Oklahoma Bar Association charged him with 11 counts {of professional} misconduct after purchasers complained that he uncared for their circumstances. He admitted to the allegations, and his legislation license was suspended for 14 months.

Years later, he handed alongside an apology word to Tremane, scribbled on the again of his enterprise 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 purchasers have had their loss of life sentences tossed after a trial court docket discovered that they’d obtained ineffective help of counsel. But appellate courts have refused to grant Tremane the identical aid.

Initially, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals discovered that Albert’s decline started shortly after Tremane’s trial. Tremane then offered affidavits from two of Albert’s former purchasers who mentioned they gave him medicine in trade for authorized companies and noticed him use cocaine incessantly, beginning properly earlier than Tremane’s trial. But the OCCA once more denied aid, this time on procedural grounds. His petition was too much like his earlier ineffective help of counsel declare and he ought to have offered this proof earlier, the court docket wrote.

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

Prosecutors repeatedly informed jurors that Brandy would spend 45 years in jail because of her plea deal. But her sentence was later modified to 35 years, and with “good time” credit score, she was launched after 12 years.

During the current evidentiary listening to, former Oklahoma County Assistant District Attorney George Burnett, one of many prosecutors in Tremane’s trial, testified that the prosecution’s plea settlement with Brandy represented the complete extent of their deal. Federal public defender Amanda Bass Castro Alves, one in every of Tremane’s present attorneys, confronted Burnett with proof that his plea settlement with one other witness for the prosecution didn’t mirror the actual fact the prosecutors dismissed and downgraded the witness’ pending felonies after Tremane was sentenced to loss of life.

Burnett then testified that the complete scope of the state’s settlement with Brandy was documented in a “memorandum,” not within the plea settlement. After studying that neither attorneys for Tremane or the state had seen the memorandum, the decide obtained a duplicate from Warden’s case file on the Oklahoma County Public Defender’s workplace. It clearly confirmed, opposite to prosecutors’ claims at Tremane’s trial, that Brandy would obtain a sentence of 35 years in trade for testifying in opposition to her co-defendants.

Asked within the evidentiary listening to why he informed jurors Brandy would spend 45 years in jail, Burnett mentioned he “made a mistake probably.”

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

At the time, Brandy was serving a deferred felony sentence for an unrelated crime, which means her sentencing was delayed and her case may very well be dismissed upon profitable completion of probation. After she was charged with felony homicide, probation officers 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 word on the report.

Lee testified on the evidentiary listening to that he had a standing settlement with the Oklahoma County district legal professional’s workplace to pursue or forgo accelerating deferred sentences to felony convictions to help with prosecutions. He mentioned he didn’t converse with anybody from the Oklahoma County DA’s workplace earlier than deciding to not pursue Brandy’s sentence — however he additionally admitted he didn’t keep in mind writing the word about “hold[ing] off.”

Had Brandy’s felony been accelerated, she wouldn’t have been eligible for a sentence modification from 45 to 35 years, Bass Castro Alves wrote in a current court docket submitting. This association allowed prosecutors to emphasise Brandy’s lack of a felony document 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 authorized 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 title is misspelled as “Termane” all through his trial information.)

In their proposed factual findings and authorized conclusions, the state denied any prosecutorial misconduct at trial and claimed that even when there was an undisclosed deal, Tremane had did not show that it might have resulted in a distinct consequence at trial.

The decide signed the state’s advisable findings verbatim.