Tremane Wood was prepared to die by lethal injection. A minute before he was to be put to death, a call came in
After a controversial trial, an Oklahoma man makes a final plea to avoid execution
The signature at the bottom of the email about witnessing an execution said cheerfully: “Oklahoma Corrections. We Change Lives!”
I had received the email three weeks earlier. It explained that I was being invited to participate in a lottery, from which five media representatives would be selected to witness the execution of Tremane Wood in the Oklahoma state penitentiary on 13 November. I had never heard of Wood, who had been convicted of the murder of Ronnie Wipf, 19, in 2002.
For more than 20 years Wood had been sitting in prison, mostly in solitary confinement. He and his brother Jake, with the help two female friends, had plotted to lure Wipf and a friend, whom they’d met at the Bricktown Brewery in Oklahoma City, to a motel room in order to rob them. But Wipf ended up murdered, with a knife stuck five inches into him.
