Oklahoma Moves To Execute Tremane Wood, Despite Evidence Of Prosecutorial Misconduct
Caroline MolloyOklahoma 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.
‘No One Was Supposed To Die’
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.
