Divided Oklahoma board recommends clemency for man scheduled for lethal injection

The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 3-2 on Wednesday to recommend the governor spare the life of a man scheduled to be executed next week for the 2001 stabbing death of a man during a botched robbery.

Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt must now consider whether to commute the death sentence of Tremane Wood, 46, to life in prison. Stitt has granted clemency only once during his nearly seven years in office, to death row inmate Julius Jones in 2021. He has rejected clemency recommendations in four other cases. A total of 16 men have been executed during Stitt’s time in office.

Stitt’s spokesperson Abegail Cave said the governor plans to meet with Wood’s attorneys, the attorney general’s office and the victim’s family before making a decision on whether to grant clemency.

“He does not take the process lightly,” Cave said.

Wood is scheduled to receive a lethal injection next week for his role in the killing of Ronnie Wipf, a 19-year-old migrant farmworker from Montana, during an attempted robbery at a north Oklahoma City hotel on New Year’s Eve in 2001.

Wood’s attorneys don’t deny that he participated in the robbery but maintain that his brother, Zjaiton Wood, was the one who actually stabbed Wipf. Zjaiton Wood, who received a no-parole life sentence for Wipf’s death and died in prison in 2019, admitted to several people that he killed Wipf, said Tremane Wood’s attorney, Amanda Bass Castro Alves.

Castro Alves said Tremane Wood had an ineffective trial attorney who was drinking heavily at the time and who did little work on the case. She also said trial prosecutors concealed from jurors benefits that witnesses received in exchange for their testimony.

“Tremane’s death sentence is the product of a fundamentally broken system,” Castro Alves said.

Prosecutors painted Wood as a dangerous criminal who has continued to participate in gang activity and commit crimes while in prison, including buying and selling drugs, using contraband cellphones and ordering attacks on other inmates.

“Even within the confines of maximum security prison, Tremane Wood has continued to manipulate, exploit and harm others,” Attorney General Gentner Drummond said.

Wood, who testified to the panel via video link from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, accepted responsibility for his prison misconduct and his participation on the robbery, but denied being the one who killed Wipf.

“I’m not a monster. I’m not a killer. I never was and I never have been,” Wood said.

“Not a day goes by in my life that I do not think about Ronnie and how much his mom and dad are suffering because they don’t have their son any more.”