Tremane Wood is on Arizona’s death row, and fighting for his life. Death penalty opponents and liberal media are also trying to rescue him from the death penalty.
When trying to overturn a death sentence in the U.S., lawyers specializing in this work often focus on legal process arguments instead of the crime itself; and advocacy strategies are designed to play on public sympathy.
For example, the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), a Washington D.C.-based non-profit organization that “does not take a formal position on the death penalty but is critical of how it is administered” (according to Wikipedia here), says (here),
“Tremane Wood was convicted and sentenced to death … for the murder of Ronnie Wipf during … a robbery, a murder that his brother, Zjaiton ‘Jake’ Wood, admitted committing. However, Jake was represented by a litigation team that worked diligently to secure a life sentence.
“Meanwhile, Tremane was appointed John Albert, an overworked attorney who was struggling with alcohol and substance use disorders while handling approximately 100 cases. Albert represented two other capital defendants at the same time he represented Wood, and both have been granted relief because Albert’s substance use impaired his ability to effectively advocate for them.”
Besides attacking the adequacy of his representation, their writeup on his case alludes to childhood “trauma and abuse,” the fact there was only one black person on his jury, and casts aspersions on the judge, all of which is pretty standard fare when seeking leniency for death row inmates.
Tremane Wood is a bad man and a danger to society. He and his brother conspired with two female accomplices to lure two male victims to a motel to rob them by having the women pretend to be prostitutes. During a struggle in the motel room, one of the victims was stabbed to death.
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals’ decision in Tremane’s case (read it here) recites that shortly before this robbery and murder, he and his brother “robbed a local pizza restaurant and attacked the owner.” This is based on the testimony of one of the female accomplices, who agreed in her plea deal to testify against them.
The Wood brothers wore masks during the motel robbery, but were distinguishable by body height and weight, and based on this the surviving victim identified Tremane, not his brother, as the knife-wielding killer.
After Zjaiton was sentenced to life without parole for the motel robbery-murder, he declared he killed the victim and Tremane wasn’t even present. He claimed his accomplice was a man named “Alex,” and said “he took the knife from Alex” and stabbed the victim. If you believe this, somebody has a bridge to sell you. Due to double-jeopardy, Zjaiton can’t be resentenced, so it costs him nothing to shift blame for the killing from his brother to himself.
Not that it makes a difference legally in Oklahoma, which has a felony murder statute, which means if you participate in a crime where someone is murdered, you can be punished for the murder regardless of who physically committed it. However, if a death row inmate didn’t commit the killing himself, that gives anti-death penalty advocates a stronger argument that he shouldn’t be executed for it, especially if the actual killer got a lesser penalty.
Taking the onus off Tremane helps generate public pressure to commute his sentence, which is what Tremane’s supporters are trying to do. Their goal is not to get him released from prison, but to change his death sentence to life imprisonment, based not on who killed Mr. Wipf, or even his defense counsel’s poor representation, but on their philosophical opposition to capital punishment.
There are serious problems with the death penalty: Convictions on flimsy evidence, racially biased juries, and courts’ reluctance to consider innocence claims, all increase the danger of executing an innocent person. Innocence projects have exonerated numerous former death row inmates. I haven’t found a clearcut case in the United States of an innocent person being executed, but it could happen, and the safest thing to do is not execute anybody in order to avoid all these problems. There are downsides to completely abolishing the death penalty, though, as opposed to using it more sparingly.
I live in Washington, which no longer has a death penalty. Without a death penalty on the books, the most that mass shooters, school shooters, serial killers, baby-killers, torture-killers, cop killers, mob hitmen, and killers for hire can get is life without parole. Frankly, some of these people deserve to be dead, or at least I think so. Problematically, an inmate already serving life without parole has nothing to lose by killing a prison guard or fellow inmate.
Tremane Wood is a bad man, but maybe not bad enough to warrant execution under a system where the death penalty exists but is rare. If his trial defense was as bad as they say, arguably he should get a new sentencing hearing. But based on the case facts and witness testimony, I think the jury convicted the actual killer, so to me the question is where your threshold is for allowing the state to kill someone.