In a highly unusual move, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board on Wednesday voted to recommend clemency for Tremane Wood, a man sentenced to death for a killing his brother admitted to committing.
The 3-2 vote was a stunning outcome in a case where the Oklahoma attorney general has personally intervened to try to secure Wood’s execution. The decision over whether to grant mercy to Wood now goes to Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R), who has only spared one man from execution since becoming governor in 2019. Wood has also asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals and the Supreme Court to review his allegations of prosecutorial misconduct and stay his execution, which is currently scheduled for Nov. 13.
As HuffPost chronicled in two previous feature stories, Wood’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, Wood has been denied relief at every turn.
In 2002, Wood, his older brother and two women were charged with first-degree murder for killing a man named Ronnie Wipf during a botched robbery. Wipf died of a single stab wound, but under the state’s so-called felony murder statute, prosecutors didn’t have to prove who actually killed him in order to secure murder convictions — only that they each participated in the robbery that led to his death.
