The cruel and unusual punishment inflicted on Tremane Wood began on the day in 2002 when he was sentenced to death for a murder he didn’t commit and didn’t end until 9:59 a.m., November 13, one minute before he was scheduled to be killed by lethal injection in the execution chamber in the Oklahoma state penitentiary. It wasn’t until that last minute that Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt commuted his sentence to life in prison without parole.
The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board had voted 3 – 2 to recommend that Stitt commute Wood’s death sentence one week before he was scheduled to be killed. Still, the governor waited to act until one minute before Wood was killed by lethal injection.
He was in a holding cell outside the chamber when he learned he wouldn’t be executed, and “he just collapsed onto the floor, just literally collapsed,” his lawyer, Amanda Bass-Castro Alves, told https://tinyurl.com/ysnk8n2f The Guardian reporter Hilary Andersson.
Just a few hours after his sentence was commuted, corrections officers found Wood unresponsive in his new cell, CBS News reported. https://tinyurl.com/akfrf7wu He was taken to the hospital, “where doctors found that his ‘medical event’ was due to ‘dehydration and stress,’” according to CBS.
The 46-year-old Wood was sentenced to death in 2004 for the 2001 murder of Ronnie Wipf, a migrant farm worker, during a botched robbery. His brother Zjaiton Wood was also convicted of murder, but was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Wood has always maintained that his brother acted alone, and that he was involved only in the robbery, and Zjaiton had confessed to being the sole killer. Zjaiton died by suicide in prison in 2019.
Wood’s was only the second commutation Stitt has granted in the seven years he’s been governor. The first was Julius Jones in 2021. During those seven years, 17 people have been executed, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.