It may be about to execute him, but Oklahoma’s department of corrections hasn’t even spelled Tremane Wood’s name right: it lists him on its official website as “Termane” Wood.
For 16 of his last 21 years in prison, following his conviction for the murder of 19-year-old Ronnie Wipf, he has been confined, often alone, to a series of windowless concrete cells in the state penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma, in an underground block that prisoners have compared to a tomb.
In that time, Wood’s life has been bleak and mentally destructive. This summer he told a social worker he was suicidal. One of his only lifelines was that sometimes the guards would give him a phone, to call his mother and family and hear their voices.
Tremane Wood. Photograph: AP
For many of those years, Wood has been a man condemned to death. But now that Wood’s execution date is approaching – tomorrow, 13 November 2025 – everything has changed.
Last month, on his 46th birthday, Wood was called out of his cell to appear before prison officials. Far from offering a message of celebration, they told him which drugs they planned to use in his execution – drugs that have caused numerous botched executions.
Then, last Thursday, a week before his execution date, they moved Wood into a clear-fronted cell. Jasmine Brown-Jutras, a community organizer and family advocate who is calling for his clemency and visited him earlier this week, said the cell is located directly next door to the execution chamber.
“He has to sit next to that [execution] chamber and he has to think about it. It’s surreal,” Brown-Jutras said.
Authorities also stopped all phone contact with family and friends. In the transparent cell, prison officials can now watch his every move, including when he uses the toilet.
In one of the last emails he was allowed to send to a friend, on Friday, he said the constant surveillance “makes my anxiety shoot through the roof”.
In a last-minute hearing last week, the Oklahoma pardon and parole board voted three to two to recommend clemency, but that may not be enough to save Wood, given that the decision as to whether he lives or dies now rests with Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, a supporter of the death penalty.
If, as planned, Wood’s killing goes ahead tomorrow, it will be the 42nd execution in the US since Donald Trump took office for the second time. Joe Biden, when he was president, declared a moratorium on federal executions; in January, Trump’s administration resumed them.
Wood’s case has caused widespread controversy. In 2004 he was convicted of first-degree felony murder in the fatal stabbing of Wipf on New Year’s Eve 2001. Wipf and a friend, Arnold Kleinsasser, were newly arrived from Montana in Oklahoma City, looking for farm work. Wood and his brother, Zjaiton (“Jake”), met them at a brewery and laid plans to rob them. Two of their female friends invited Wipf and Kleinsasser to a motel room, where they offered sex for money. The brothers then burst in, armed and masked, and in the struggle that followed Wipf was stabbed to death.
Each brother had his own trial. Tremane’s came first, where Jake voluntarily confessed that it was he who actually committed the murder. But that did not help his brother. Although the prosecutors argued that it was Tremane who delivered the fatal blow, under Oklahoma law, to convict him they did not actually have to prove that – just that he participated in the armed robbery that resulted in death. (Later, in Jake’s trial, the state recognized Jake’s confession that he committed the murder.)
Jake, defended by experienced lawyers, was sentenced to life in prison. Tremane, however, was represented by the trial attorney John Albert, who admitted to drinking heavily during the trial; other attorneys and court filings allege he took cocaine. He failed to call a particular witness, Lanita Bateman, one of the two women involved, who has said Jake admitted to her after leaving the motel that night that “he thought he’d killed a guy”.
After Tremane was sentenced to death, Albert handed him a business card. “I’m sorry,” it said. “You got me at a bad time.”
The Oklahoma state penitentiary in McAlester, Oklahoma. Photograph: Sue Ogrocki/AP
“One of the biggest injustices in Tremane’s case is that the system appointed him a trial lawyer who was abusing substances at the time,” said Amanda Bass Castro-Alves, who is now his lead attorney. Along with various lawyers over the years, she has fought hard for years for Wood’s death sentence to be overturned, and pushed for clemency at the recent hearing.
Family also say Albert did little to build a case around Wood’s life story, his character and his remorse. Wood’s childhood was shrouded in violence. His father, Raymond Gross, a police officer, exacted cruelties on his mother, Linda. One day he stripped her, tied her to a bed, covered her with alcohol, lit a lighter and threatened to burn her alive.
“He told me to tell my mother goodbye,” said Andre Wood, 49, Tremane’s brother. “Tremane saw a lot of abusive actions. We would hear my mother screaming.”
Jake was known as a troubled, hardened and angry kid, but he always tried to protect Tremane; friends say Tremane idolized him. The brothers, who grew up in Guthrie and Langston, Oklahoma, joined gangs at a young age.
A couple of months after his release from prison in late 2001, Jake persuaded Tremane to join him in the fateful robbery, his family says. The day after the murder, Tremane was so distraught that he threw up on his cousin, Roshonda Jackson. “He kept screaming, ‘Nobody was supposed to die,’” Jackson said in a documentary made by the Tremane Wood Foundation.
Jake killed himself in prison in 2019 after Tremane’s appeals against the death penalty failed.
In addition to their family history and Wood’s shabby legal representation, the case has also played out in a state with a long history of racism stretching back to before the Tulsa race massacre of 1921.
Today in Oklahoma, Black people who kill white people are approximately three times more likely to get the death penalty than white defendants who do, according to a 2017 report by the Oklahoma Death Penalty Review.
In the trial of Wood, who is Black, the jury was all white but one. The judge, Ray Elliott, who passed sentence, was accused in a court affidavit in 2017 of making racist comments, allegedly calling Mexicans “filthy animals”. Elliott has denied being racist and has denied making the statement.
There is also criticism of the drugs that would be used in the execution – a three-drug “protocol” of midazolam, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride. Several executions using the drugs have led to victims gasping, lurching or struggling before death.
Midazolam, which is administered first, is a sedative, not a true anesthetic, and experts say it leaves the prisoner conscious. “There is a high likelihood of pain,” said Dr Craig Stevens, professor of pharmacology at Oklahoma State University.
The second injection paralyses the condemned person, who begins to suffocate and is unable to scream or move. The third injection induces cardiac arrest.
The US supreme court has ruled that the use of these chemicals in executions is not a violation of the eighth amendment, which bans cruel and unusual punishment, though the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor said using midazolam exposes prisoners to what may be “the chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake”.
Now Wood’s life rests in the hands of the governor, Stitt, a Republican who supports the death penalty and has sent several other men to their death in spite of clemency recommendations. The Oklahoma department of corrections says the governor may not even make a ruling. “We proceed as usual until we hear from either the governor or the courts, which may never happen,” it said in an email to the Guardian last week.
Wood’s execution is being aggressively supported by Oklahoma’s attorney general, Gentner Drummond, who this summer emailed the judge asking for more time to build the prosecution’s case.
Drummond, who has already attended nine executions, believes that Jake’s admission to the murder was false. He claims it was Tremane who bore the murder weapon, not Jake – a matter that has been disputed, given the struggle inside the motel room. Prosecutors also presented compelling evidence at his clemency hearing that in prison Wood has dealt in contraband, including drugs and cell phones, and instigated violence.
“The murder of Ronnie Wipf stands as a horrific reminder of how cruel and calculated one individual can be,” said Drummond at the hearing. “Mercy without repentance is not justice. It is permission for evil to endure.”
Drummond is running for governor of Oklahoma, and Wood’s family believes he is using the case to score political points. “The aggressive actions that the attorney general took to try to get Tremane’s execution was political,” said Andre Wood, speaking on the phone from Oklahoma City. “I think he is doing it to show people he’s a ‘plays no games’ type of person, just like Donald Trump. It’s red meat for the base.”
And yet even the victim’s family, although they remain in deep sorrow 24 years after losing their son, do not want to see Wood executed. Speaking on the phone from her home in a religious Hutterite community in rural Montana, Barbara Wpif, Ronnie’s mother, said: “Our belief is that God will judge, that he will be judged on the judgment day.”
Wood maintains, if not his complete innocence, then his determination that he does not deserve to die. “I’m flawed and in many ways a broken human being,” he said at his clemency hearing last week. “But I am not a monster. I’m not a killer”.
On Wednesday, he sees his family to say goodbye, in case last-minute clemency is not granted.
After that, until 10am local time on Thursday, when his execution is scheduled, he can only look at the four walls and try to control his racing mind.
