His Brother Admitted To A Murder. He Is Set To Be Executed For It.
Caroline MolloyOklahoma’s top prosecutor wanted to make sure a man who was never proven to have killed anyone would be executed by the state. And so, on a Tuesday afternoon in July, he sent a secret message to a judge, asking for some help. “I have an active investigation issue that I wish to address with you,” Gentner Drummond, the state’s attorney general, began his email.
The recipient was Gary Lumpkin, the top judge on Oklahoma’s Criminal Court of Appeals. The subject line misspelled the name of the man on death row, Tremane Wood.
It was a tricky case for Drummond, who had cultivated a reputation as a fair arbiter of capital punishment. The death penalty is supposedly reserved for the “worst-of-the-worst” kind of criminals, but Tremane was never a particularly compelling example. In 2002, Tremane, his older brother and two women were charged with first-degree murder for killing Ronnie Wipf during a botched robbery. Wipf died from a single stab wound, but under the state’s so-called felony murder statute, prosecutors didn’t have to prove who killed him in order to secure murder convictions — only that they each participated in the robbery that led to the death.
Tremane denied stabbing Wipf. He was represented at trial by a lawyer struggling with drug addiction who billed almost no work on the case, and Tremane was sentenced to death. His older brother, who testified that he had killed Wipf, had robust legal representation and received a life sentence. The outcome seemed perverse on its face: The person who admitted to the murder received a more lenient sentence than his little brother, who swore he had never killed anyone.
Even some of the people who helped convict Tremane came to feel that something had gone wrong. The jury foreperson, the only Black member of the jury, has said she felt pressured into voting for death and would have held out for life if she had had more information about the case. The state’s star witness, who is also the mother of Tremane’s eldest son, told HuffPost she doesn’t want Tremane to die. So did the surviving victim of the robbery, as well as the mother of the man who was killed.
Drummond had previously asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals (OCCA) to set Tremane’s execution for Sept. 11, which would have required the state to hold a clemency hearing ahead of time. At that hearing, Tremane and his lawyers would have the chance to make the case for mercy and ask the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board to recommend that the governor spare his life. Maybe the manifest unfairness of the sentences would capture national sympathies and pressure the state to back down from the execution.
So Drummond — who is running to become the state’s governor as a tough-on-crime attorney general — came up with a plan that could sabotage Tremane’s chances of clemency. To pull it off, he wanted help from Lumpkin, the judge who was overseeing the case. He explained in the email, which was recently unsealed in a court filing, what he needed and then signed off: “Thank you in advance for your indulgence in this request.”
The attorney general’s attempt to enlist help from the judge overseeing Tremane’s case to clear the way for his execution is a major blow in a case that was already emblematic of the systemic unfairness in how the criminal justice system determines who deserves to be killed by the state. As HuffPost chronicled in detail in a previous feature, Tremane’s case is marked by allegations that his death sentence was the result of both his severely impaired trial lawyer and prosecutors who played dirty. Despite the common belief that the lengthy appeals process in capital cases ensures that constitutional violations at trial will be rectified before the execution date, Tremane has been denied relief at every turn.
In the final days ahead of Tremane’s scheduled execution — including as recently as this week — additional details have emerged exposing how Oklahoma’s prosecutors and judges have coordinated in ways that have undermined Tremane’s final chances at a meaningful review of his case.
Drummond’s press secretary Leslie Berger declined to respond to a list of questions about his handling of Tremane’s case, citing an “investigation” into Tremane, although she declined to specify who is conducting the investigation. Asked if Tremane fit the description of the “worst-of-the-worst” criminals the death penalty is supposedly reserved for, Berger wrote, he “was found guilty by a jury and sentenced to death.” She asserted that he had a fair trial.
