On Death Row For A Crime His Brother Admitted To

MCALESTER, Okla. — Linda Wood was not in the courtroom when her son Jake Wood was sentenced.

She had already seen her youngest son, Tremane Wood, go to death row for the murder, which he insisted he did not commit. It seemed all but inevitable that Jake, who at one point had bragged about killing the victim, would follow. Linda could not bear to watch.

Close enough in age to be mistaken for twins, Tremane and Jake had always been inseparable — until they were forced apart in foster care, group homes, juvenile detention centers and eventually, prison. In 2002, they, along with two women, were charged with first-degree murder for the killing of Ronnie Wipf during a botched robbery in Oklahoma City. The charges didn’t distinguish between degrees of culpability — all four were accused of being equally responsible for Ronnie’s death.

Under the state’s so-called felony-murder statute, anyone involved in a felony that leads to a death can be held criminally responsible for that death, regardless of intent or involvement in the actual killing. Prosecutors didn’t have to prove who killed Ronnie, only that each of the defendants participated in the robbery that resulted in his death. The state sought lengthy prison sentences for the women — who had fled by the time of the killing — and death sentences for Tremane and Jake.

At Tremane’s trial, prosecutors portrayed him as the killer, and a jury sentenced him to death. At Jake’s trial the following year, prosecutors flipped their script and suggested Jake had killed Ronnie. As the Wood family braced for a second death verdict, the jury delivered a shocking decision: Jake was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

“Thank God they aren’t going to kill my baby,” Linda cried as she learned the news.

That initial burst of relief gave way to a decades-long struggle to reckon with Tremane’s death sentence and the ripple effects of prosecutors’ decision to aggressively charge four people for a killing that the facts showed only one person committed. In interviews with Tremane on Oklahoma’s death row, his family, friends and lawyers, as well as a surviving victim of the crime and the victim’s mother, the same question lingers: How did Tremane receive a harsher punishment than his older brother, who had admitted to the killing?

The answer, according to Tremane’s current lawyers, comes down to the quality of legal representation each brother received. Jake was represented by three experienced capital defense lawyers from the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System, who painstakingly investigated the case to develop their strategy. Tremane was represented by a private lawyer appointed by the court, who billed just two hours of work on the case outside of court and later admitted to doing an inadequate job of defending his client. After Tremane’s trial, the lawyer temporarily lost his law license because of client neglect associated with his drug and alcohol abuse.

“It crosses my mind that all this ain’t fair, but life ain’t fair,” Tremane said during an interview earlier this year, shackled at the hands and legs, with a chain around his waist. The interview took place days after he was previously scheduled to die; the state postponed his initial execution date after the Oklahoma attorney general requested that the state’s executions be scheduled further apart.

“Maybe it happened to me so it doesn’t happen to someone else,” he said.

Sixteen-year-old Linda Wood arrived in Guthrie, Oklahoma, in 1974, after enrolling in a Job Corps program to escape abuse back home in Florida. She soon met Raymond Gross, a married police officer 12 years her senior.

“That’s the biggest mistake I ever made in my life. He was the lowest, no-good, meanest — mean for no reason — son of a bitch you would ever meet in your life,” Linda said. “And he damn near killed me.”

They named their first son Andre, followed by Zjaiton — who went by Jake — and then Tremane.

Raymond was the type of cop who was always in uniform, even when he wasn’t working, Tremane said. He took pride in the job and relished the authority. Tremane’s childhood memories are of his dad beating his mom. When he was 14, he described to a social worker watching Raymond strap Linda to a chair, pour alcohol on her and threaten to set her on fire. When Tremane and his brothers tried to protect her, he beat them, too.

“I don’t remember anything good he did,” Tremane said. “I never heard him say, ‘I love you.’”

At least two of the assaults are documented in hospital records. In a separate incident, Raymond pleaded no contest to feloniously pointing a gun at Linda to threaten her. But because Raymond was a cop, Linda didn’t feel she could turn to the police for help, and most of the abuse went unreported.

“He has handcuffed me and dragged me down the highway on the outside of the car,” Linda said. “He has beaten me to the point where you couldn’t even tell what I looked like, knocked my teeth out, broke my nose, broke my bones, and then wouldn’t let me even get any medical help. He’s tied me up and beat me with an extension cord. I got hit in the head with a pipe wrench.”

The abuse was psychological, too. Once, when the boys were young, Raymond told them their mom had died when, in fact, she had fled to a women’s shelter in California. In an attempt to get Linda to return, Raymond told her mom that Andre had been killed in a car accident. Linda’s mom only realized it was a lie after calling the funeral home and discovering Andre’s body was not there.

Linda was convinced that Raymond would kill her if she left, but eventually decided “being dead can’t be any worse than this hell,” she said.

“And with that, I left and never went back.”

Raymond, who died in 2012, admitted in court to whipping his sons “like a normal father would,” pushing Linda one time and handcuffing her to a car another time. He denied abusing Linda or his sons.

Before leaving Guthrie, both Jake and Tremane were sexually abused by a male neighbor, they later told separate psychologists. Tremane was so ashamed that he did not disclose the abuse to anyone aside from Jake for more than 30 years, the psychologist who evaluated Tremane noted in a report this year.

Linda and her boys moved to Stillwater, about an hour north of Oklahoma City. Tremane’s sixth-grade teacher, Cindy Birdwell, remembers him as a sweet, well-liked kid who showed up for school on Valentine’s Day with a giant card he had made for her.

But Tremane and his family struggled in Stillwater. Linda worked minimum-wage jobs from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. while going to school to earn her bachelor’s and eventually, master’s degrees. She worried about her boys — especially Jake, whom she described as an increasingly angry kid who lacked impulse control and learned to use his intimidating stature to get what he wanted. She suspected he needed mental health treatment, but they didn’t have health insurance.

Jake viewed himself as his mother’s protector, which had made him a target of his father’s violence, he told a psychologist after he was arrested. Each time Linda reconciled with Raymond felt like a “violation of his trust” that put the family at risk, Jake told the psychologist.

As a child, Jake used drugs and alcohol to cope with the chaos. He joined a gang when he was 10 or 11 and later started up a chapter in Stillwater. The gang offered the “only consistent rules present in his life and the only group with whom he felt totally accepted,” the psychologist wrote. Jake would go on to spend most of his life in and out of group homes, treatment centers and correctional facilities. At one point, “he asked not to be released and appeared to act out when release was near,” the psychologist wrote.

“After being told you’re bad for so long, eventually you go, ‘OK, that’s what I am. Let me be that,’” Andre said. “And that’s what happened to Jake.”

Jake first put a gun in his little brother’s hand when Tremane was 11 or 12. When Tremane resisted going along with whatever Jake wanted to do, Jake would beat him up. He viewed it as his responsibility to show Tremane that they lived in a “world of cruelty,” he testified at an evidentiary hearing during Tremane’s appeal.

“We didn’t have the opportunity, you know, to have, you know, everything that we needed,” Jake said. “I just wanted to show him that it was a way that you can grow up and have those without having to bow down and kiss ass.”

Those who watched the brothers grow up together described their bond as unparalleled. “It was beyond bounds,” Andre said. “I’ve never seen anyone be that loyal to a person. Tremane would follow Jake to the end of the Earth. Tremane just loved his brother. And Jake loved Tremane. And there was nothing that could break that. Nothing.”

“Jake is Tremane’s idol, he would die for Jake,” Linda told a social worker in 1994.

After growing up in a mostly Black small town, the boys were thrust into the mostly white city of Stillwater, where kids called them “n*****s” and their mom a “n****r-lover.” When they got in fights with the kids hurling racist abuse, they were often the only ones who got in trouble. One time, a police officer driving his personal vehicle stopped the boys as they were walking, put a gun to their heads, and accused them of robbing a convenience store. Another time, a police officer saw Tremane smoking a cigarette and asked where he’d gotten it, since he was under 18. When Tremane put the cigarette out on the ground, he was arrested for littering.

“They depicted us as monsters,” Andre said, “and my mom as the ringleader of these monsters.”

In sixth grade, Tremane missed about half of the school days, failed most subjects and was accused of various property crimes, which brought him into contact with the juvenile justice system. The district attorney sent Linda a letter threatening to file criminal charges against her if Tremane’s school attendance did not improve.

Over the next couple of years, Tremane bounced between his mother’s, his father’s, and, at one point, went to live with Jake and his girlfriend. Once back with Jake, Tremane “seemed to go on a spree of assaults and was involved in gang activity,” a juvenile services officer wrote in a report. At 14, he was placed in the custody of Oklahoma’s Department of Human Services.

A state evaluation described Tremane as a “bright young man” who joined the gang because he wanted to be like Jake, but recognized that his brother was “going nowhere.” He spoke with pride about his mother supporting three kids while putting herself through college and said that most of his assault charges resulted from his peers harassing him for having a white mother who had married a Black man.

Tremane was sent to a foster home about 90 miles from Stillwater where he played football and earned good grades. But when he returned home four months later, he fell back into gang activity. He did six months in a juvenile detention facility, where, again, he stayed out of trouble. But once home, he “deteriorated rapidly,” a juvenile probation officer wrote in a report, expressing fear of losing Tremane to the adult prison system or a gang shooting.

Tremane’s records are full of people speculating that if only he had been removed from the toxic influence of his family, he would have turned out OK. He doesn’t see it that way.

Part of why he did well in out-of-home placements was because he wanted to return to his family, he said. He felt that his mom needed him and his brothers around. He wishes his mom had had more support so she wouldn’t have had to work multiple jobs and could have been home more.

“Who else did we have but us?” he asked.

Arnold Kleinsasser was raised in rural Montana in a colony of Hutterites, members of a religious group similar to the Amish. He attended a Hutterite school, grew up primarily speaking German, and did farming, ranching, gardening and carpentry work. He didn’t have a television or computer, but sometimes he and the other kids would sneak snippets of sportscasts on pocket radios.

Arnold was always curious about the world outside the colony. In the summer of 2001, when he was 19 years old, he set out for a farming job upstate. When the seasonal gig ended, his boss suggested he head to Texas to work on a harvest crew.

“I was totally OK with that,” Arnold said. “It was a new adventure.”

There, Arnold became friendly with Ronnie Wipf, an outgoing Hutterite from a colony near the one where he grew up. They carpooled home to Montana for Christmas — and, on their way back to Texas after the holidays, made what would be a fateful stopover in Oklahoma City.

Around that time, Tremane was working at a pizza restaurant in the city. A lot had changed in his life, and he’d become a father to two kids. His first child, whom he had with his ex-girlfriend and childhood friend Brandy Warden, was born shortly before Tremane spent about two years in prison. His second son, from a different relationship, was born in August 2001. He was focused on providing for his family and staying out of trouble.

Then, in October 2001, Jake returned home after spending seven years in prison.

Tremane’s behavior changed when Jake came back, Linda would later testify. “He started spending more time with Zjaiton and doing more drugs,” she said, referring to Jake by his given name. “And doing and going wherever Zjaiton wanted him to go.”

Shortly after returning home, Jake started dating 19-year-old Lanita Bateman. She had just finished earning her GED and was working toward a career in physical therapy. She hoped to get her mom a house with a fence so she could have a dog.

“It didn’t seem like huge plans, but they were important to me. I just wanted to help my mom have an easier life,” Lanita wrote in a letter from Oklahoma’s Mabel Bassett Correctional Center. (Lanita agreed to an in-person interview, but the state’s Department of Corrections only allows individuals to be on the visitation list for one person in the state at a time, and I had already visited Tremane.)

Jake had a rare ability to control the atmosphere of any space he was in, Lanita wrote. “If his attention was caught on you, then you were done for. … If for some reason he could not get what he wanted, he would scheme a way to take it.”

On New Year’s Eve of 2001, Tremane’s cousin Roshanda Jackson invited him to celebrate with her and her friends. “Unfortunately, Jake came by and interrupted our plans,” Jackson wrote in a 2022 affidavit. “I remember Jake saying things to Tremane like, “Let’s go get this money” and “You gonna be a pussy?”

Jake and Tremane planned to ring in the new year at the brewery where their older brother worked in Oklahoma City’s Bricktown neighborhood. Arnold and Ronnie, who were driving back down to Texas, decided to stop at the same brewery to celebrate with a group of guys they knew from the harvest crew.

That night, Tremane, Jake, Brandy and Lanita went to a Walmart. As Brandy was checking out, the guys put two pairs of gloves and ski masks on the counter for her to purchase. The group stopped briefly at a pizza place, where the brothers robbed the owner and walked away with about $40, Brandy would later testify. Then, they headed to the brewery.

As the brewery was closing down, Ronnie started talking with Brandy and Lanita. Ronnie motioned for Arnold to join them, and he shyly obliged. He had never asked a girl out, much less picked up strangers at a bar. Ronnie suggested the four of them go back to a motel room. Brandy and Lanita didn’t want to go, they would later say, but felt pressure from Jake and Tremane to get money from the unsuspecting out-of-towners.

Once at the motel room, the group negotiated a price of $210 in exchange for sex. Arnold and Brandy drove to an ATM and Arnold gave her the cash. Lanita was “scared to death,” she later wrote in an affidavit. She gave Jake the motel room number, hoping she and Brandy could escape without having sex and that he and Tremane would pick them up.

But before anything else could happen, there was a knock at the motel room door. Brandy and Lanita both recognized Jake’s voice, calling out, “Brandy, Lanita, it’s your mama!”

As the banging on the door continued, Ronnie told the women to “get the hell out of there” and said he wanted his money back, Arnold later testified. Ronnie opened the door, and as the girls ran out, two masked men in long trench coats and leather gloves burst into the room.

The taller man held a gun and the smaller one had a knife. The taller one ordered Arnold to his knees, pointed a gun at his head, and demanded money. Arnold crawled to his coat, found his wallet, and handed over the $68 he had left. He could hear Ronnie screaming as he struggled to fight off the other assailant.

“Just shoot the bastard,” Arnold heard one of the masked men say to the other. He heard a shot fired and smelled gunpowder.

The smaller man who had been fighting Ronnie approached Arnold, hit him in the head and demanded more money, but Arnold had already turned over all his cash. As both men refocused their efforts on Ronnie, Arnold saw an opening.

He bolted out the door and was able to get out of the building. He hid behind a fence in a nearby apartment complex until he saw a white car leave the motel. He started making his way back toward the motel but ended up crawling into a dumpster when he saw people he thought may have been approaching him. He hid, shaking in the January cold, for about two hours. When Arnold finally made it back to the motel, a detective told him Ronnie had been fatally stabbed.

After Brandy and Lanita fled the motel room, they found Tremane’s girlfriend’s car unlocked in the parking lot. Jake and Tremane emerged about 10 minutes later, jumped in the car, and ordered Lanita to drive. They dropped Tremane off at his girlfriend’s and then headed to Linda’s house.

There Jake tended to his bleeding hand. He told Lanita the gun had malfunctioned and injured the part of his hand between his thumb and index finger, an injury that was likely the result of a “slide bite.” He told Lanita that he had killed someone, although he did not specify how, she said in an interview. When she later learned that Ronnie had died from a stab wound, she suspected that after Jake’s gun had malfunctioned, he had taken the knife from Tremane.

When Jackson saw her cousin Tremane the next day at a friend’s house, he was red in the face, shaking and crying, she wrote. She took her cousin to her car, where he became so distraught that he threw up. “He kept saying he was sorry,” Jackson wrote. “When I asked him what was wrong he said, ‘No one was supposed to die!’”

Jake and Lanita headed two and a half hours east to stay with family, while Tremane went to Houston and Brandy stayed in Stillwater. Within a week, all four were arrested and charged with first-degree felony-murder, robbery with firearms, and conspiracy to commit robbery with a dangerous weapon.

For the next several years, Arnold would be tasked with reliving the nightmarish night of the crime over and over at each trial. “I don’t know if I was just numb to it or blocking it out,” he said, “but I felt like I had a duty.”

Nearly every state, as well as the federal government, has some form of a felony-murder rule, and 21 states allow felony-murder convictions to be punished with a death sentence. This sweeping legal doctrine is responsible for absurd outcomes: women being charged with murders committed by their abusive partners, a 17-year-old girl being charged with murdering her classmates who died of drug overdoses, the friends of a 19-year-old boy who was killed by the police being charged with his death.

Most state agencies don’t track felony-murder cases separately from other murder charges, making it difficult to know how often it is used and how many people are incarcerated as a result. The information that is available suggests that felony-murder cases are particularly susceptible to racial bias, according to Boston University School of Law instructor Caitlin Glass, whose research has found that Black people are disproportionately convicted of felony-murder.

“By reducing the prosecution’s burden of proof, there are fewer legal elements to guide both charging decisions and jury decisions,” leaving people to “fill in the blanks with racial bias,” Glass said.

Like most people, Tremane didn’t know about felony-murder before he was charged with it. After his arrest, he thought he might be charged with accessory to murder. He still remembers sitting in the courtroom more than 20 years ago, listening to the prosecutor read from a “bill of particulars” describing the egregious factors of the crime. He tried to follow along, but it was only after the hearing that he learned what had just happened: The state was seeking the death penalty against him and his brother.

“It’s you vs. the State of Oklahoma,” he recalled in an interview. “I barely have $20.”

Technically, it was the “State of Oklahoma vs. Termane Wood.” As if to underscore his insignificance to the system tasked with determining whether he would live or die, Tremane’s name is misspelled throughout his court files.

When Lanita was first arrested, she assumed she would be going home soon. She wasn’t in the motel room when Ronnie was killed and she had never even had a traffic ticket. But her private attorney rarely visited her, she said, and when he did, he tried to convince her to cooperate with the state. She refused, citing an unwillingness to help send Jake or Tremane to death row. Growing up, Lanita had lost family members to violence and others to prison. “Even as a little girl, there was always some innate feeling that [the death penalty] was wrong,” she wrote to HuffPost.

Heading into trial, Lanita believed that, if convicted, she would have an opportunity for parole after 15 years. Instead, she was sentenced to life plus 101 years, with the chance to seek parole in 2040, when she will be 58 years old.

“I was devastated,” she wrote.

Brandy agreed to plead guilty to reduced charges and testify against her co-defendants in exchange for a 45-year sentence, which was later modified to 35 years. She took the deal, she said at the time, because she wanted to return home one day to her three children, including Tremane’s eldest son, Brenden. Brandy did not respond to interview requests.

Conflict-of-interest restrictions prevented the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System from representing both of the Wood brothers, so the court appointed Tremane’s case to private attorney Johnny Albert. Under Oklahoma law on indigent defense, Albert could only bill up to $20,000 for his work on the case, and his co-counsel, Lance Phillips, could bill $5,000 — not nearly enough money to fund a capital defense team. At the time, defense lawyers for people facing the death penalty worked an average of 3,557 hours per trial, according to a 2010 report. Had Albert put in that amount of time, he would have made about $5.62 an hour.

Albert was well-known within the Oklahoma County legal community. He became a lawyer because he “idolized” his father Barry Albert, a flamboyant prosecutor-turned-public-defender known for his dramatic courtroom performances. Barry Albert died in 2000, shortly before Johnny Albert was appointed to represent Tremane. Albert would later describe the death of his “best friend” as an event that contributed to his descent into addiction.

Tremane initially felt cautiously optimistic about Albert, who had a decent reputation within the county jail. But he started to worry when he saw other guys having phone calls and visits from their lawyers and he had yet to hear from his. During Tremane’s two years in jail awaiting trial, Albert never visited. Phillips, who did not respond to a request for comment, came once to deliver a court-ordered handwriting assessment. When Tremane tried calling Albert’s office, no one would answer. Tremane never saw Albert outside of court.

“You’re gonna have to man up,” Tremane remembers Albert telling him the first time they met ahead of a court hearing.

Once, Linda went to Albert’s office uninvited to check up on Tremane’s case. She said she walked away thinking, “We’re in big trouble.”

The care Jake’s lawyers devoted to his case only made Albert’s negligence more apparent. Jake initially wanted to plead guilty and surrender himself to death row. But his lawyers worked hard to build his trust and he eventually agreed to participate in his defense. His legal team formed their trial strategy by interviewing Jake’s family members and friends and gathering thousands of pages of records that documented Jake’s turbulent life up to the time of the crime.

American Bar Association guidelines call for death penalty defense teams to include at least one investigator to focus on issues of guilt or innocence and another to focus on mitigation. Jake’s legal team followed this guidance: In addition to three lawyers, there were two investigators — one who focused on Jake’s role in the crime and another who focused on mitigating factors, or evidence that Jake deserved mercy at sentencing. Albert did not hire an investigator for Tremane’s case.

Jake’s team “left no stone unturned,” Linda said. “Tremane got nothing.”

Throughout his pretrial proceedings, Tremane watched his lawyer physically deteriorate. “His face was getting more gaunt. It looked like he was unraveling,” Tremane said.

“I was hoping to not get the death penalty, but I had no faith because Johnny wasn’t prepared,” Tremane said. “I knew this was a wrap.”

Tremane’s trial began in March 2004. The state didn’t have to prove who killed Ronnie in order for Tremane to receive the death penalty — only that he participated in the robbery that led to Ronnie’s death. Prosecutors also didn’t have clear evidence about who stabbed Ronnie. Brandy testified that Tremane and Jake were the two masked intruders and that she saw Tremane, the smaller of the brothers, holding a knife — but she had fled the room before Ronnie was killed. Similarly, Arnold testified that the smaller of the two intruders had a knife, but he could not identify who killed his friend.

Still, the prosecution repeatedly argued that Tremane was the one who killed Ronnie.

Albert waived his opening statement and initially planned to call no witnesses during the first stage of trial, when jurors are asked to determine whether the defendant is guilty or innocent. But while the jury took a break just before closing arguments were set to begin, Albert made a shocking announcement: Jake wanted to testify that he killed Ronnie Wipf.

Both Albert and Jake’s lawyers had advised against it, they told the judge. But ultimately, Albert deferred to Tremane.

To 24-year-old Tremane, the decision was easy. Faced with execution, his lawyer planned to call no witnesses on his behalf. His brother — who still faced trial, who had nothing to gain and everything to lose by testifying — wanted to get up on the stand and take responsibility. What Tremane could not have appreciated at the time was how risky it was to put a desperate, volatile, unprepared witness on the stand.

“This is highly unusual. In my 25 years in this courthouse, I have never been involved in any case in which this has occurred,” Raymond Elliott, the judge, said to Jake. “I can’t say that I understand your motives, but that is not my job to understand motives.”

Jake took the stand. On the night of Ronnie’s death, Jake testified, he had asked Tremane if he wanted “to get on some Crip shit.” He said that Tremane declined, saying he had a family to take care of. He claimed that Tremane was never at the motel and that his accomplice during the robbery was a white man named Alex, whose last name he did not know.

Jake said that when they first entered the motel, he had a gun and Alex had a knife. But he claimed that once Alex started struggling with Ronnie, he took the knife. “I grabbed the victim by the head and I stabbed him in the chest and told him I was God,” Jake testified.

“I don’t want my brother to die for something that he is not guilty of,” Jake testified. “I mean, if he was guilty of this, you know what I’m saying, I would tell him to be a man and face the heat. But he’s not guilty.”

Oklahoma County Assistant District Attorney Fern Smith peppered Jake with questions about “this Alex person,” noting that this was the first time Jake had mentioned his existence. Jake’s answers were vague and unconvincing. She argued that Jake’s willingness to risk his life to testify at Tremane’s trial wasn’t a sign of his sincerity but of manipulation.

“Isn’t it true that you love your brother?” Smith asked, according to a transcript of the trial.

“Of course,” Jake said.

“Isn’t it true that you would lie to get him out of trouble?” Smith continued.

“No, it is not,” Jake said.

“Isn’t it true that the two of you stick together?” she asked.

“All of my life,” he said. “I tried to raise my brother.”

“Isn’t it true that you are only testifying here to save your brother’s life?” Fern asked.

“No, it’s not,” Jake said.

“Isn’t it true, sir, that the plan you and your brother Tremane Wood have cooked up … is for you to come in here and testify for Tremane Wood and get him off, get him acquitted? Then on your trial … he is going to come back in here and do the same thing for you?”

To the extent that Albert had a trial strategy, up until that point it had been to try to leave the jury with reasonable doubt about what had happened the night of Ronnie’s death. Jake’s claims obliterated that approach. Tremane’s defense could no longer lean on uncertainty — now they had to convince jurors to believe a version of events directly contradicted by Brandy, the mother of Tremane’s child.

Letting Jake testify was a “fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants trial approach,” Tremane’s current lawyer, federal public defender Amanda Bass Castro Alves, said in an interview. The part of the testimony about “Alex” was not credible and ended up harming Tremane’s case, she said. Jake “should have just said the truth — ‘We committed this robbery together. Tremane was there. But I’m the person who killed the victim. My brother didn’t do this.’ But he went too far.”

There was available evidence that Jake was telling the truth about being the one who killed Ronnie. Before Lanita was sentenced in 2003, a parole officer prepared a pre-sentence investigation report that documented Lanita’s recollection of the crime. In the report, Lanita describes hearing Jake say that “he thought he killed a guy” after they got home from the motel.

Lanita invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and refused to testify for the state at Tremane’s trial. But that report could have been admitted at trial through the testimony of its author, according to Tremane’s current lawyers. Moreover, had Albert reached out to Lanita, he would have learned that she was willing to testify in support of Tremane.

“I did not testify at trial because I did not want to be responsible for helping put someone to death. Had I known it would have been helpful to [Tremane] to testify, after I was sentenced, I would have testified,” Lanita wrote in a 2011 declaration.

During her closing remarks, Smith, the prosecutor, reminded jurors that it didn’t matter who had the gun and who had the knife because “under the law, once they participate in this conspiracy, and this robbery, they are equally guilty.”

But moments later, in her final words to jurors, Smith claimed Tremane was the killer. “Tremane stabbed Ronnie Wipf. Stabbed him to death and he died,” she said. “And he is guilty of Murder in the First Degree.”

After five hours of deliberation, the jury returned its verdict: Tremane was found guilty of all charges.

The penalty phase of Tremane’s trial — to determine whether Tremane would be punished with death or life in prison — lasted just one day. Albert did “very little” to prepare, relying on Tremane to “properly explain and develop the mitigation portion of the defense,” he would later admit. Because Albert did not work with the witnesses to prepare their testimony, he was unable to elicit responses that made a compelling case for Tremane to live.

Albert called three witnesses: a family friend who briefly answered questions about whether Tremane loved his children (she said he did); a psychologist who seemed unfamiliar with parts of Tremane’s juvenile record and suggested that some “allegations” about his “chaotic family background” might be “invalid”; and Linda, who testified that she had been abused by Tremane’s father, but whom the prosecutor accused of lying on the stand.

In her closing argument during the penalty stage, Smith described Tremane as an unrepentant killer. “This person stuck a big knife into the chest of a 19-year-old man. Stuck it in there five inches. And never said to one person, ‘I’m sorry about that,’” Smith said.

“What kind of person is that? Somebody different from you and me. And that fact … is the reason why he deserves the death penalty,” Smith said. “How can you kill, intentionally, knowingly kill another human being and not be sorry about it?”

The evidence did not conclusively support Smith’s claim that Tremane killed Ronnie — much less that he had done so intentionally. But her narrative was compelling, and Albert didn’t do much to convince jurors to spare Tremane’s life.

“I don’t want to get religious on you, but I believe in God. I mess up all of the time. But let’s let God decide [Tremane’s] ultimate fate. People make mistakes. There’s no room for mistakes here. I don’t want to — please, hold it against me,” Albert said in meandering closing remarks. Smith “said he is not like you and me. She is different,” Albert continued. “She is a sinner. You’re a sinner. I am a sinner. He is a sinner. He is not — he is not like you and me. Bull. He is like you and me. He’s done things worse. But he is like you and me.”

Watching the trial unfold was torture, Andre said. “I’m sitting there, looking at my mom, going, ‘This is the fucking lawyer?’” he said. “I wanted to get up and say, ‘Can I represent my brother? Because this asshole has no clue what he’s doing.’ You can just tell the guy was out of it. I mean, I’ve seen fucked-up people. This lawyer was fucked-up.”

Under Oklahoma law, in cases where the death penalty is sought based on the felony-murder rule, jury instructions are supposed to specify that the defendant is only eligible for a death sentence if jurors find that he killed, intended to kill, or was a major participant in the felony and was recklessly indifferent to human life. Jurors in Tremane’s trial inexplicably did not receive this instruction, and Albert failed to request that it be added.

Jurors returned just before midnight that evening to deliver their decision. They sentenced Tremane to death.

Although Tremane had tried to brace himself for the worst outcome, he struggled to process what he was hearing. “This is the stuff you see in the movies. Time stopped,” he said. “I wasn’t prepared for it — to hear that. It was unbelievable — even more unbelievable when you know you didn’t kill anybody.”

At Albert’s request, each juror was polled to ensure they agreed with the verdicts.

Jera Burton, the jury foreperson and the only Black member of the jury, paused when it was her turn to respond.

“I signed the one for death because everybody was waiting on me. I didn’t want everyone to be here,” Burton said.

Elliott, the judge, repeated his question. “Are those your verdicts?”

This time, Burton simply said, “Yes.”

A few months later, Albert submitted an invoice for $10,000 for his work on Tremane’s case — half the amount he was legally allowed to bill. He billed just two hours for work outside of court appearances.

Once Tremane was sentenced to death, Jake wanted to go to death row, too.

“He didn’t want to see me die,” Tremane said. “Bro always told me if I die, he dies.”

Jake’s insistence on seeking the death penalty briefly prompted his lawyers to withdraw from the case. “Our job is not to walk you to the death chamber,” Wayna Tyner, the lead attorney on the team, recalled telling him. But he eventually agreed to go to trial, and they rejoined the case.

Over time, Jake warmed to his lawyers. He joked that if he died, maybe he could come back as the child of Tyner and her co-counsel.

“It sounds crazy, but he loved me as a person, and I loved him,” Tyner said.

Tyner and her colleagues were trained in the so-called “Colorado Method” of jury selection, a technique in which defense attorneys extensively question potential jurors on their attitudes about capital punishment and use that information to select and reject jurors. It was a time-consuming process, but one that Tyner believes had a significant impact on the outcome of Jake’s case.

Jurors found Jake guilty of felony-murder — but the real fight came down to whether he would be sentenced to life or death.

Jake’s trial took place in the same courthouse, before the same judge, with the same prosecutors as in Tremane’s trial. During pretrial proceedings, Elliott, the judge, ruled that the state could introduce Jake’s testimony from Tremane’s trial — but could not argue inconsistent theories of the crime. Elliott specifically instructed prosecutors not to “argue, infer, state, mention or otherwise allude to” Jake being the stabber. Assistant District Attorney George Burnett agreed, stating, “We will argue to the jury Tremane did the stabbing.”

Despite Burnett’s assurances, when the trial began, the state reversed course, arguing that it was Jake who had killed Ronnie. In addition to introducing Jake’s testimony from Tremane’s trial, prosecutors called a handwriting expert to read letters allegedly written by Jake and sent to Brandy and Smith, the prosecutor. In the letters, the author bragged, in graphic detail, about the killing and threatened further violence.

“You have evidence from the defendant’s mouth that … that he did in fact murder Ronnie Wipf,” Smith said during the penalty stage. “You also have some letters where he, himself, said he murdered Ronnie Wipf. Not only did he murder Ronnie Wipf, he liked it. He enjoyed it.”

When Jake’s lawyers objected to the prosecution describing Jake as the one who stabbed Ronnie, the judge issued a warning but allowed the state to continue.

Prosecutors “did not merely take inherently inconsistent positions at Tremane’s and Jake’s trials,” Tremane’s current lawyers wrote in his habeas petition, they “affirmatively attacked evidence offered by Tremane that Jake was the actual killer, while making that same evidence the centerpiece of its case against Jake months later.”

At least 29 people have been sentenced to death in the U.S. in cases involving allegations of inconsistent prosecutions, according to a ProPublica report. The Supreme Court has sidestepped the issue of whether contradictory prosecutions violate due process protections, and lower courts are divided on the issue. Some judges have harshly criticized the practice: “Such actions reduce criminal trials to mere gamesmanship and rob them of their supposed purpose of a search for truth,” a federal judge wrote in a 2000 opinion. But in most cases, judges have allowed the resulting convictions and sentences to stand.

Throughout Jake’s trial, his lawyers focused on the lack of eyewitnesses or forensic evidence tying him to Ronnie’s death. They reminded jurors that Arnold had identified the smaller of the two masked men as the one holding a knife. And they successfully convinced the judge to strike one of the aggravating circumstances jurors could consider.

Jake’s lawyers also planned to humanize him to jurors. They had gathered 10 witnesses who were prepared to testify about how Jake was impacted by his violent childhood and the ways they had experienced his softer, caring side. Their testimony could provide a counternarrative to the state’s description of Jake as “evil,” “vile,” and the “worst of the worst.”

But when it came time, Jake wouldn’t allow his lawyers to call a single mitigating witness.

American Bar Association guidelines require capital defense lawyers to investigate and present mitigating evidence. To not present potentially life-saving evidence would leave jurors with an incomplete picture of events and violate Jake’s constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel, Jake’s lawyers explained to the judge without the jury present.

But Elliott was unmoved: It was Jake’s trial, and he had the right to decline to have certain evidence presented.

Jake’s lawyers went on to list each witness and describe what they were prepared to say. It was a way of documenting Jake’s decision — but it was also “to show Jake that his life had value and meaning,” Tyner said.

All that was left for Jake’s lawyers was to try to sway the jury in closing arguments, and they took an unconventional approach. Jake’s claim that he was the one who had killed Ronnie wasn’t an admission of guilt, they argued, but an attempt to manipulate the jury into sentencing him to death.

“If you really want to punish Zjaiton Wood, you will give him the sentence that he fears, that he’s trying to manipulate against,” said L. Wayne Woodyard, one of Jake’s lawyers. “And that’s not the death penalty.”

As her co-counsel spoke, Tyner could feel heat emanating from Jake’s body. It was a “completely unusual strategy, but it’s all we had,” she said. “And it was the truth.”

A year after Tremane was sentenced to death for the crime Jake confessed to committing, Jake was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

“We had just heard the verdict that we won, we saved his life,” Tyner said. But before she could celebrate, she saw Jake, seated to her right, reach for the metal water pitcher on the table and hurl it toward Smith. The pitcher grazed the prosecutor’s head and crashed into a railing at the front of the jury box.

The next day, Jake attempted to hang himself with his bed sheet in his jail cell. The sheet broke; he survived and was transferred to prison.

Years before they represented the Wood brothers, Albert and Tyner worked together on a case. Albert, who had been contracted by OIDS for the case, had a reputation for being a superstar in the courtroom, but Tyner and her colleagues ended up doing most of the work preparing for the trial, Tyner told HuffPost in an interview.

Tyner found Albert charming, and she couldn’t help but like him. “But even at that time, he’s probably not somebody I would have wanted representing my child,” she said.

Years after Tremane and Jake’s trials, Tyner represented a woman on appeal who had been represented by Albert at trial. She was stunned by the poor quality of Albert’s work on the case. “I just don’t know how he could look at himself in the mirror,” Tyner said.

More than 60 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that anyone accused of a felony had a guaranteed right to a lawyer, even if they could not afford to hire one. But with public defense perpetually underfunded, there’s no guarantee of good legal representation. The standard for proving ineffective assistance of counsel is incredibly high. The individual has to prove that their lawyer was objectively “deficient” and that the outcome of a case would have been different with a competent lawyer. The Supreme Court has directed judges to be “highly deferential” to the lawyer’s judgment and to avoid second-guessing their strategy. Even when defense lawyers admit they did a bad job on a case, judges regularly deny relief.

Tremane alleged on appeal that he had received ineffective assistance of counsel at trial. He submitted a sworn affidavit from Albert in which the lawyer admitted that he “did not prepare enough of a mitigation case to effectively represent and defend” his client. Albert said in the 2005 affidavit that he would no longer take death penalty cases because he didn’t have enough time.

Albert appeared as a witness for a 2006 evidentiary hearing related to Tremane’s appeal. His face was visibly roughed up from an altercation at a bar the previous night. Although he had already admitted in the affidavit to inadequately representing Tremane, he took a more defensive tone on the stand. Asked by Tremane’s appellate lawyer how many times he had interviewed Tremane’s mom, Albert shot back, “We practice law differently. Interview at my office, zero. Talked to her at court, asked what I needed.”

The following week, Albert was arrested after repeatedly failing to show up in court for another case. After admitting to struggling with substance abuse, he was released on bond and began inpatient drug and alcohol treatment.

The Oklahoma Bar Association charged Albert with 11 counts of professional misconduct based on complaints from clients who said he had neglected their cases. Albert admitted to the misconduct allegations, and his law license was suspended for 14 months.

Elliott, the trial judge, denied Tremane’s request for a new trial or new sentence, finding that Albert’s actions were part of his trial strategy. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the denial.

In the following years, two of Albert’s former clients in separate cases had their death sentences thrown out after a trial court found that they had received ineffective assistance. Keary Littlejohn was resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. James Fisher, who was represented by Albert in his second trial after his first conviction was overturned on ineffective assistance of counsel grounds, opted to take a plea deal rather than go through a third trial. He was freed from prison in exchange for pleading guilty to a reduced charge and agreeing to permanently leave Oklahoma.

Tremane remembers Littlejohn and Fisher from the county jail. Their trials took place the year after his. He filed a petition for post-conviction relief, citing the findings from the Littlejohn and Fisher cases as well as the disciplinary proceedings against Albert as evidence that his lawyer was deficient.

But the OCCA denied the petition, finding that Albert’s “client neglect, abuse of drugs and alcohol and emotional instability” appeared to have started after Tremane’s trial had ended. Part of the court’s argument was that during his disciplinary hearing, Albert had testified that “everything started to crumble” in March 2005. This wasn’t true, but Tremane didn’t have definitive proof at the time.

After the denial, Albert signed another declaration, this time admitting that he was “drinking on a regular basis” while representing Tremane. Albert had “no strategic reason” for his conduct in Tremane’s case, he wrote.

When Albert, who had been sober for five years by then, gave the declaration to Tremane’s lawyer, he included an apology note, scribbled on the back of a business card: “Treman Im sorry for everything in the past. You got me at a bad time and its not your fault. Its mine. I will do anything I can to help you. You can call or write if you want. Johnny.”

Albert died in 2018 at the age of 50. After his death, Tremane’s legal team found what seemed like incontrovertible proof of Albert’s impairment while representing Tremane. Two of Albert’s former clients provided sworn affidavits detailing Albert’s struggles with drugs and alcohol well before, and during, Tremane’s 2004 trial.

Michael Maytubby met Albert in 2001 when he needed a lawyer to represent him in a negligent homicide case. They began to spend time together socially, and Maytubby observed Albert’s increasing drug use.

He saw Albert take Oxycontin, Lortab and Xanax while drinking. By 2002, the year Albert was appointed to Tremane’s case, Maytubby was giving Albert cocaine in exchange for legal work. By 2003, Albert would stop by Maytubby’s house in the morning before going to court to use cocaine, Maytubby wrote.

The other former client, Benito Bowie, met Albert in 1998. “During the almost decade I knew John, he did cocaine every day. John also drank regularly, probably daily,” Bowie wrote. Around 2000, Albert became connected with a gang called the Playboy Gangsta Crips. According to Bowie, Albert represented gang members in exchange for drugs.

Presented with this evidence, the OCCA again denied Tremane’s petition on procedural grounds. His claim was “for all intents and purposes, identical” to his previous claim of ineffective assistance of counsel, the court wrote. Moreover, the court wrote, Tremane failed to prove that he could not have presented this evidence when he first filed for relief.

Tremane’s litigation journey is emblematic of the appellate process in death penalty cases. Although there are several opportunities to raise issues at trial, the burden of proof is exceedingly high and the scope of what courts will consider becomes increasingly narrow at each stop of the process. When Tremane first sought relief in post-conviction proceedings, the OCCA declined to even allow an evidentiary hearing, finding that Tremane did not have proof of Albert’s addiction at the exact time of his trial. Once Tremane found that proof, the court said it didn’t matter because he had already raised the issue and should’ve found that proof earlier.

“It really is a catch-22,” said Bass Castro Alves, Tremane’s current attorney. “It creates a procedural trap that has made it basically impossible for Tremane to get a court in Oklahoma to review this evidence and his ineffective assistance of counsel claim.”

As it stands, Albert admitted to doing a bad job on Tremane’s case and struggling with addiction. Multiple witnesses have sworn that they saw Albert using drugs and alcohol during work hours throughout the time he represented Tremane. The Oklahoma Supreme Court found that Albert was so negligent in representing various clients that it suspended his law license for more than a year. The OCCA let two men off of death row — and let one of them out of prison altogether — because Albert’s legal representation was so ineffective that it had violated their constitutional rights.

Yet, Tremane is still on death row, awaiting the exact date of his execution.

“I’m not asking to go home,” he said. “I just want a fair trial with a competent lawyer.”

Those awaiting execution in Oklahoma are imprisoned at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, a facility built more than 100 years ago by incarcerated laborers. OSP sits in McAlester off the Indian Nation Turnpike, which has an 80-mile-per-hour speed limit. With cement columns dotting the perimeter, the entrance to the sprawling prison resembles a medieval fortress.

When Tremane arrived in 2004, death row prisoners were held on H-unit, a constellation of windowless cement cells “that effectively constitute a dim underground bunker,” as the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma described it. One man told the ACLU-OK being held in the building was like being “buried alive.”

Death row prisoners spent 22 to 24 hours per day in their cells. The one hour of solitary exercise they were allowed on some days took place in an enclosed concrete room with an opaque skylight ceiling that blocked any view of the sky. There was no rehabilitative programming and very limited opportunities to work. Those who were approved to receive visitors had to speak to their loved ones on opposite sides of plexiglass.

Tremane, now 45, has grown up on death row, reflecting on his role in what happened on New Year’s Eve in 2001. “I have to sit and think every day about how I had the power to say no,” he said. “I could have put a stop to everything before it started, but I didn’t have the courage.”

“My heart breaks for Ronald Wipf and his family, for Arnold, and everyone whose lives were impacted that night. I wish I could turn back the clock and make different decisions that would have prevented this all-around tragedy.”

Although jurors were repeatedly told Brandy would spend 45 years in prison as a result of her plea deal, her sentence was later modified to 35 years. With “good time” credit, she was released in 2014 after 12 years.

Whatever resentment Tremane may have felt about Brandy’s decision to testify against him and his brother has dissipated. “I always have some kind of love for her. We’ve been through a lot,” he said. He now recognizes that their son, Brenden, would have spent his entire childhood without either parent if Brandy had refused to cooperate. “I can’t be mad at her for being in a position she never should have been in,” Tremane said. “That’s on me.”

Brenden, who was 3 years old at the time of the crime, was raised by relatives on his mom’s side of the family. He eventually built a relationship with Brandy through letters, phone calls and infrequent visits. But his family shielded him from information about Tremane. What little he was able to draw out was overwhelmingly negative.

On Brenden’s 9th or 10th birthday, the relative he lived with gave him a birthday card from Tremane, decorated with a hand-drawn picture of Spider-Man. He later found out his dad had been writing to him for years, but that his relative had hidden or thrown away the letters. “I was upset, but I had accepted disappointment was a common part of my life,” Brenden said in an interview.

Brandy came home when Brenden was 15 years old, and it was like she had never left, he said. “Regardless of how much time you spend apart, once you know who your mom is, and she’s done nothing to hurt you, you have a really strong bond with them — you’d do anything for them.”

Brandy arranged for Brenden to finally visit his father. He was struck by how similar they looked and how kind he was. Tremane wanted to know everything about Brenden and give his son a chance to ask any questions he may have had. The phones had been removed in Tremane’s unit, so they had to lean in close to hear each other through the thick panes of plexiglass.

“I was tearing up, trying to keep my composure. It tore me up inside knowing that half the stuff I heard about my dad this whole time was wrong,” Brenden said. “A bunch of lies. They made him out to be a monster. Acting like someone can’t make a mistake and be forgiven.”

It was an incredible relief to see his father, Brenden said. “He’s there, he’s not just a photo. He’s real.”

Tremane Jr., Brenden’s younger half-brother, grew up with even less information about his namesake. When he was about 13, he started searching online, where he found news articles and court records about the crime that landed his father on death row. It was a jarring discovery, and he wanted to know more. When he turned 18, he drove to McAlester to meet his father.

“It was kind of like looking at a stranger, because there was so little time to build a parental bond,” Tremane Jr. said. “But I was still overjoyed to be there. It was an uncontrollable happiness.”

After more than 20 years of being each other’s closest friends, Tremane and Jake were never allowed to see each other, or even speak over the phone. Jake continued to struggle in prison, battling what his family members described as “personal demons.” He felt responsible for Tremane being on death row.

In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the lower court’s denial of Tremane’s habeas petition, which made him eligible for execution.

Months later, Jake died by suicide in his cell at CoreCivic Cimarron Correctional Facility, a private prison. (Tyner only agreed to discuss parts of her conversations with Jake because her former client is no longer alive.)

Tremane was the first in his family to hear of Jake’s death. He called his mom, who “just screamed bloody murder,” Andre said.

“When I heard Tremane’s voice, that’s when I knew it was real,” Andre continued. “Because in the 20 years that he’s been on death row, that’s the only time I’ve ever heard my brother cry.”

Living on death row steels a person for loss, but losing Jake was like losing a part of his identity, Tremane said. “I had to find myself. How I move, how I interact with people — even in prison, we were still linked together. Now I’m here by myself.”

In late 2019, under pressure from the ACLU’s Oklahoma chapter, the state’s department of corrections announced it would move death row prisoners to another unit. The guys still spend nearly 24 hours a day locked in their cells, but now they have windows. Individuals selected to participate in a pilot program can play basketball inside what Tremane compared to a dog cage. Most importantly to Tremane, they are now allowed contact visits, which allows for a brief hug and kiss before sitting on opposite sides of a long table in the visitation room.

Linda still remembers their first contact visit. She had spent the previous 17 years thinking about the last time she had hugged her youngest son, before he was arrested — and wondering if she’d get the chance to do it again before he died. “I cried. It was amazing.”

The year that Tremane got to death row, there were 91 people in Oklahoma awaiting execution. Today, just over one-third of those people are left. Among the dead include Clayton Lockett, who thrashed, writhed, groaned and bled on the gurney before eventually dying of a heart attack 43 minutes after officials began the lethal injection protocol. Lockett’s horrifically botched 2014 execution prompted then-President Barack Obama to question the use of the death penalty in the U.S., although he later backed away from the issue.

After Lockett’s death, a group of death row prisoners, including Tremane, asked a federal judge to halt their executions, arguing that the state’s lethal injection procedure violated constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. Shortly after they filed suit, one of the plaintiffs, Charles Warner, was executed. “My body is on fire,” Warner said after being injected with what turned out to be the wrong drugs.

The back-to-back botched killings prompted Oklahoma to declare an execution moratorium. During that time, the lethal injection litigation continued and the state’s attorney general promised not to seek execution dates until the case was over.

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, legal challenges to execution methods can only succeed if the individual shows not only that the method is unconstitutional, but also offers a reasonable alternative. In a court filing that the plaintiffs signed on to, lawyers offered four alternative methods of execution, but U.S. District Judge Stephen Friot instructed each plaintiff to affirmatively select their preference.

Former federal public defender Dale Baich was one of the lawyers who had the unenviable job of traveling to McAlester to ask each of the men how they wanted to die. Several refused to discuss the question, repulsed by the idea that they should assist the state in killing them. At first, Tremane didn’t want to meet with Baich. He relented after receiving a handwritten note from him.

“He said, ‘If you don’t do this, you will get dismissed from the case and you will die,’” Tremane recalled Baich telling him in the visitation room. Tremane chose the firing squad.

Friot, the judge, ultimately dismissed six of the plaintiffs, including one who later said he did not intend to decline an alternative execution method. The state quickly set execution dates for the dismissed plaintiffs, starting with John Grant, who vomited, convulsed and cursed as he died. The first execution after Oklahoma ended its moratorium also marked the state’s third consecutive botched execution.

As Oklahoma geared up to resume executions, Cindy Birdwell, Tremane’s sixth-grade teacher, got word that he was on death row. She felt called to reach out and offer her support.

Tremane was stunned. He wasn’t used to anyone outside of his immediate family stepping up, and he assumed his teachers had either forgotten about him or just remembered him as someone who got into trouble. Birdwell had provided her phone number, but he was too nervous to call. Instead, he wrote a four-page letter in neat, slanting cursive, expressing his gratitude and answering her questions.

“I hope you have a great day and be blessed,” he signed off.

Tremane tried to stay positive for his family and avoid letting on how traumatizing it was to exist on death row. In Birdwell, he found a confidante he didn’t feel he needed to protect in the same way. He described the conditions at McAlester and what it did to his mind — how it made it hard to think, to grieve, to stay sane. She told him she suspected he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and he confessed that she was probably right.

“Sometimes I feel so isolated from the world it’s hard to literally catch my breath,” Tremane wrote in November 2021, the month after Grant was killed. “Sometimes I put on a good face but I’m just lost in this maze.”

Tremane clung to reasons for hope, like when Julius Jones, whose innocence claim attracted national attention, received a last-minute commutation from the governor. Jones, whose death sentence was commuted to life in prison without parole, was represented by federal defender Bass Castro Alves, the same lawyer who is currently leading Tremane’s legal team.

But the steady pace of executions took its toll. Tremane thought of all the people he had watched say their final goodbyes to their families, including a man whose mom had sewed a quilt for Tremane’s niece. He remembered the guys who tried to kill themselves before letting the state dictate the terms of their death. He watched people who once prided themselves on looking put together start to unravel once they got their execution dates. He noticed which items the dead had gifted to others on the row, a lingering reminder of who was once among them. He imagined all the bodies being carried out.

“I don’t mean to dump all my emotions in this letter, but I feel like we’re in a no-win situation no matter how much one of us have grown or changed,” Tremane wrote on Aug. 25, 2022, the day James Coddington was executed. Coddington had received a rare clemency recommendation from the state’s pardon and parole board, but Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) rejected the recommendation and allowed him to be killed.

That year, Judge Friot ruled that Oklahoma’s lethal injection method was constitutional. With the lawsuit over, Oklahoma scheduled 25 executions, including Tremane’s. He was scheduled to die Feb. 8, 2024.

During what Tremane believed would be his last year of life, he focused on building as many memories as he could with his loved ones. He had emerged as a trusted sounding board for family members, even for some who never knew him outside of death row.

Micky Winn-Scannell initially tried to keep her two kids away from their uncle Tremane. She wanted to spare them the pain of growing close to someone who would be executed. Despite her efforts, they got to know him through letters and phone calls. “He listens. I don’t have to worry about how he’s gonna feel or how he’s gonna act … I can share everything with him and feel like I’m not being judged,” Winn-Scannell recounted her teen daughter telling her.

Winn-Scannell hasn’t tried to put a stop to their communication because she’s noticed a positive shift in her daughter. She believes Tremane has helped her gain the confidence to make her own decisions and take control of her life. Last year, Winn-Scannell’s daughter wrote a school paper arguing against the death penalty. The themes of his case were sprinkled throughout her argument: ineffective trial lawyers, arbitrary sentencing outcomes, racial disparities on death row, and the punishment it imposes on the families of the condemned.

Brenden, Tremane’s oldest son, joined the Army when he was 19 years old. Now 26, he sounds much older, speaking matter-of-factly about life as a series of gives and takes. He is driven by an innate desire to do the right thing. He wants his kids to have an easier time than he did, and he doesn’t want his family’s name dragged through the mud any further. He knows Tremane would do anything to help him, but he also doesn’t want to give his dad one more thing to deal with.

When Brenden thought his dad’s death was imminent, he began the process of requesting time off from the military so that he could travel to witness the execution. He didn’t think he would be able to get enough time off to visit Tremane in advance, and would only arrive in time to watch him die. “I’m used to disappointment,” Brenden said for the third time during our call. “Prepare for the best, expect the worst.”

In January 2023, Gentner Drummond became Oklahoma’s attorney general. One of his first acts in office was to ask the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to slow down the pace of execution, arguing that the schedule set by his predecessor was “unsustainable” and “unduly burdening” prison staff. The court accepted, which led to Tremane’s execution being pushed to an unspecified date next year.

Meanwhile, a surprising effort to rein in the death penalty in Oklahoma is underway in the state legislature, where Republicans hold supermajorities in both chambers. Prompted in part by the case of Richard Glossip — who survived nine execution dates and whose conviction is so shaky the state attorney general has asked the Supreme Court to vacate it — a group of Republican lawmakers have mobilized around an execution moratorium. They have also pushed a bill to take the death penalty off the table in felony-murder cases where jurors did not find that the defendant killed the victim. If lawmakers pass a felony-murder reform bill with retroactive provisions, Tremane could go back to court for resentencing.

Earlier this month, GOP state Rep. Justin Humphrey, a former Department of Corrections employee who often dons a cowboy hat, led an interim study on felony-murder. One of the witnesses at the hearing was Jera Burton, the juror who indicated at Tremane’s trial that she felt pressured into agreeing to a death sentence.

“I am here today because the decision I made in 2004, casting my vote for the death sentence, haunts me today,” Burton said through tears. She described learning more about Tremane’s difficult childhood after the trial had ended. If she had that information at trial, she said, it would have helped her stand her ground.

Two additional jurors have said in declarations that the trial judge told them they had no choice but to reach a unanimous decision, when in fact, a single holdout could have resulted in a deadlocked jury and a mistrial.

Tremane and Linda don’t talk about the prospect of his death. “Even though I know in my heart that it’s a very real possibility, I can’t, at this point, deal with it, or I would be crying all day every day,” Linda said. If he were to die, “then two-thirds of my heart is gone, and it’s hard to live for very long with one-third of a heart.”

When Ronnie Wipf left home after his Christmas visit in 2001, he promised his mother, Barbara Wipf, that he would return by Easter. When he was killed days later, his holiday gifts from his mom were still packed in his suitcase. Ronnie’s death reverberated through the colony, a cautionary tale of the outside world. His mother fell into a deep depression; the loss is still palpable in her voice, even 23 years later. But as a Hutterite, Barbara does not support the death penalty.

“The Lord will take care of punishment,” she said. “That’s not for us to decide.”

In 2005, Arnold Kleinsasser, the surviving victim of the 2001 New Year’s Eve robbery, went off the side of a mountain in a front-end loader. He survived being ejected 300 feet from the vehicle and “became a born-again believer,” he said. “The accident happened in September. And in October, I was saved.”

Asked to recall the night of the robbery, Arnold can still place himself at the scene — the brewery, the motel, the dumpster. But it’s not something that continues to haunt him, he said. Late last year, Arnold received a letter from Tremane, apologizing for his role in the crime and acknowledging the cascading impacts it had on all of them and their families.

“It was neat to be able to see where he was at,” Arnold said. He thought about what it must be like for Tremane to be separated from his kids and not be able to do anything about it. “I can’t even imagine. If anything, that, right there, is punishment.”

Whenever the state pushes forward with executions, there’s talk of the need to provide finality to the victims. But no one from the state has ever asked Arnold what he actually needed after the crime — or if it would bring him comfort to see Tremane executed.

“Being a Christian, I would be totally against it,” Arnold said. “I look at it from a perspective of how much I’ve been forgiven from God. And that’s the same forgiveness I’m called to extend to [Tremane].”

“There’s things that we’re all capable of doing, following our fallen nature,” he said.

Last year, Tremane Jr. drove his baby daughter to McAlester to meet her grandfather. As Tremane cradled her, he tried to adjust his arms so that the shackles binding his limbs together didn’t dig into her soft flesh. It was a moment he never thought he’d live to experience.

“I don’t have time to be upset. Being upset takes time and energy,” he said. “I’d rather invest in the people I love.”

“All these days are extra.”