Oklahoma moves to execute Treman Wood, despite the evidence of fiscal misconduct

Oklahoma Attorney General, Gentner Drummond, asked a court on Thursday to scheduled the execution of Treman Wood on September 11 of this year. The presentation occurs weeks after a probative hearing after the conviction threw a convincing evidence of what Treman and his legal team had insisted for years: his death sentence was the result of an unfair trial.

Treman, the theme of a News themezone investigation Last year, he was sentenced to death in 2004 for a homicide that has constantly maintained that he did not commit. His brother, who admitted the murder, was sentenced to life imprisonment without probation, a disparity of sentence that the current Treman lawyers attribute to the quality of the legal representation provided to each brother in the trial. It is also a marked example of Inconsistent results of the murder statutes for serious crimewhich states that anyone involved in a serious crime leads to death can be criminally responsible for that death, regardless of intention or participation in real murder.

The probative hearing, held for three days in April, revealed that prosecutors had deceived jurors about the incentives offered to two of their witnesses of trial in exchange for their testimony. The revelation offered the possibility that Treman, who has argued for decades that he had deprived of a fair trial for multiple reasons, could finally obtain a new trial. On the other hand, the Judge of the District Court Susan Stallings adopted the factual conclusions proposed by the State and the legal conclusions, including typographic errors in the state brief, and denied the request for Tremano relief.

Treman is appealing the judge’s decision and will seek a request for clemency of the governor. On Friday, Treman asked the Oklahoma Criminal Court to block the execution until its pending claims were resolved. But in the absence of the intervention of the courts or the governor of Oklahoma Kevin Stitt (R), he faces the execution at the end of this year.

Treman Wood Team

‘No one should die’

Treman grew up in Guthrie, Oklahoma, the youngest of three children. Some of his first memories are from his father hitting his mother and threatening to kill her. When Treman and his brothers tried to protect their mother, their father also defeated them. Because his father was a policeman, his mother did not feel that he could resort to the police for help.

“He has handcuffed me and dragged me along the road outside the car,” said Treman’s mother, Linda Wood, News themezone last year. “He has hit me to the point that you couldn’t even say how I saw me, he hit my teeth, broke my nose, broke my bones and then did not let me receive medical help. He tied me and hit me with an extension cable. I hit my head with a pipe key.”

“It is really difficult to raise your children when you are in survival mode,” Linda said in a video prepared for Treran clemency application. “There is a saying that says everyone dies, but not everyone lives. And we weren’t living, we were just surviving. Just trying to stay alive for another day.”

Both Treman and his next most common brother, Zjaiton Wood, were sexually abused by a male neighbor, then told separate psychologists. Zjaiton, who went for Jake, faced trauma with drugs and alcohol when he was a child. He joined a gang when he was 10 or 11 years old, and brought Treman shortly after.

The bond of the brothers was “beyond the limits,” said his older brother Andre Wood in an interview. “Have I have never seen anyone be so loyal to a person. Treman would follow Jake until the end of the earth. Treman simply loved his brother. And Jake loved Treman. And there was nothing that could break that. Nothing.”

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

Jake was a violent and increasingly angry boy who lacked impulse control and learned to use his intimidating stature to get what he wanted, Linda said in an interview with News themezone. She wanted to receive a mental health treatment, but they didn’t have health insurance.

Treman planned to spend the New Year’s Eve in 2001 with his cousins, but Jake convinced Treman to go out with him. Jake had recently returned to the prison house, and after separate years, Treman was anxious to spend time with his brother, he said in an interview last year.

The brothers went to a brewery in Oklahoma City with Jake’s girlfriend, Lanita Bateman, and the ex -life of a lifetime, Brandy Warden. The girls ended up talking with two men from outside the city: Ronnie Wipf and Arnold Kleinsasser, who passed through the city to Texas to work on a harvest team. Ronnie and Arnold grew in the rural area of ​​Montana in a colony of Hutteritas, a religious group similar to Amish, and only recently had abandoned the colony.

Ronnie suggested that the four return to a motel room. Brandy and Lanita did not want to go, later they would say, but they felt Jake and Treman pressure to get money from the naive extracted from the city. Once at the motel, they negotiated a price of $ 210 in exchange for sex. But before something happened, Jake and Treman knocked on the door, wearing masks, long ditches and leather gloves. When Ronnie opened the door, the girls exploded and the brothers moved, an army with a gun and the other with a knife.

Arnold gave one of the masked men $ 68 in his wallet, but Ronnie defended himself. Arnold escaped, hiding in a garbage container for hours in the cold of January. When he returned to the motel, a detective told him that Ronnie had been fatally stabbed.

That night, Jake told Lanita that she had killed someone, although she didn’t say how, she said in an interview. When Treman’s cousin, Roshonda Jackson, saw him the next day, he collapsed, so distressed that he vomited, she wrote in a sworn statement of 2022. “He kept saying that he felt it,” he wrote. “When I asked what was wrong, he said: ‘No one should die!'”

An absent lawyer

In a week, Jake, Treman, Lanita and Brandy were arrested and accused of murder for serious crime of first degree, robbery with firearms and conspiracy to commit robbery with a dangerous weapon. The State looked for long prison sentences for women, who had fled at the time of murder, and death sentences for Jake and Treman.

Brandy, who had three children, including a son with a treman, agreed to declare himself guilty of reducing charges and testifying for the state in exchange for a shorter sentence. She took the deal, said at that time, because one day she wanted to go home with her children. She did not respond to interview requests.

Lanita, who had only met Jake for a few months, refused to cooperate with the State, citing a lack of will to help send someone to death to death. She was sentenced to life for over 101 years, with the opportunity to seek probation in 2040, when she is 58 years old.

Jake was appointed team of three experienced defense lawyers of the capital of the Oklahoma indigent defense system, which thoroughly investigated the crime, as well as the mitigating circumstances, to develop their defense strategy.

Because it would be a conflict of interest for the office to represent both brothers, Treman was appointed private lawyer named Johnny Albert. Albert was allowed to bill up to $ 20,000 for his work in the case; His co-abogado was allowed $ 5,000. At that time, the defense lawyers of the people who face the death penalty an average of 3,557 hours worked By trial. If Albert had worked so much in the case, he would have won less than $ 6 per hour.

Finally, Albert invoiced only two hours of work outside the apparitions in the Court in the case of Treman. He never visited his client and did not respond the telephone calls of Treman or his family. He could not identify evidence that Treman was not the one who killed Ronnie, or presented a convincing image of the abusive childhood of Treman and Jake’s Sway about him. Critically, he did not communicate with Lanita, who listened to Jake to admit the murder. Lanita would have been willing to testify in Treman support, wrote in a 2011 statement.

Albert also neglected to prepare Jake, who insisted on testifying at the Treman trial before his account. During the trial, Jake declared that he was the one who stabbed Ronnie, but also falsely said that Treman was not present in the robbery, an affirmation that lacked credibility after Brandy, the mother of Treman’s son, testified that Treman was present.

“I expected not to get the death penalty, but I had no faith because Johnny was not prepared,” Treman said in an interview last year. “I knew this was an envelope.”

Seeing the development of the trial was agonizing, said his brother Andre. “I’m sitting there, looking at my mother, going, ‘Is this the damn lawyer?'” He said. “I wanted to get up and say: ‘Can I represent my brother? Because this fool has no idea what he is doing.'”

Throughout the trial, prosecutors argued that Treman was the Royal murderer, a version of the events that would later contradict Jake’s trial. They did not need to demonstrate that Treman killed Ronnie to ensure a guilt verdict or a death sentence, but it was part of his strategy to convince the jury that Treman represented the worst criminal. Brandy became his key witness. Although he had fled before Ronnie was stabbed, he testified that Treman and Jake were the two intruders masked in the motel, and that the smallest of the brothers, Treman, was holding the knife.

In 2006, Albert was arrested for not appearing repeatedly in court for another case. He admitted to having fought with substance abuse and the treatment of drugs and alcohol for hospitalized patients began. The Oklahoma Lawyers Association accused him of 11 positions of professional misconduct after customers complained that he neglected their cases. He admitted the accusations, and his legal license was suspended for 14 months.

Years later, he transmitted a note of apology to Tremana, jarable on the reverse of his presentation card. “Treman, I’m sorry for everything in the past. You have me in a bad time and it’s not your fault. It’s mine. I will do everything I can to help you.”

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Two of Albert’s former clients have launched their death sentences after a court of first instance determined that they had received ineffective assistance from a lawyer. But the appeal courts have refused to grant Treran the same relief.

Initially, the Oklahoma Criminal Appeals Court found that Albert’s decline began shortly after the Treman trial. Treran then presented sworn statements of two of Albert’s former clients who said they gave him drugs in exchange for legal services and saw him use cocaine frequently, starting long before the Treman trial. But Occa again denied relief, this time for procedural reasons. His request was too similar to his previous ineffective assistance from the law of lawyers and he should have filed this evidence before, the court wrote.

In 2019, the Supreme Court refused to review the denial of the lower court of the Treman habeas request, which made it eligible for execution. Months later, Jake died from suicide in his prison cell.

Secret Cooperation Agreements

The fi Scales repeatedly told the jury that Brandy would spend 45 years in prison as a result of his guilt agreement. But his sentence was modified later to 35 years, and with “good weather” credit, it was released after 12 years.

During the recent probative hearing, former Oklahoma County Assistant Prosecutor, George Burnett, one of the prosecutors in the Treran trial, testified that the prosecution of the Prosecutor’s Office with Brandy represented the total scope of his agreement. Federal Public Defender Amanda Bass Castro Alves, one of Treman’s current lawyers, faced Burnett with evidence that her guilt agreement with another prosecution witness did not reflect the fact that prosecutors dismissed and degraded the serious crimes of the witness after Treman was sentenced to death.

Burnett then testified that the complete scope of the State agreement with Brandy was documented in a “memorandum”, not in the plea agreement. After learning that neither the lawyers for Treman or the State had seen the memorandum, the judge obtained a copy of the Warden case file in the Oklahoma County Public Defender’s office. He clearly showed, contrary to the statements of the prosecutors in the Treran trial, which Brandy would receive a 35 -year sentence in exchange for testifying against his coacked.

When asked at the probative hearing why he told the jury that Brandy would spend 45 years in prison, Burnett said “he made a mistake probably.”

“I never underestimate my, my ability to say something stupid to a jury,” Burnett said.

At that time, Brandy was fulfilling a serious crime judgment deferred by an unrelated crime, which means that his sentence was delayed and his case could be dismissed by successfully completing probation. After she was accused of murder for serious crime, probation officials presented a violation report, recommending the “acceleration” of their deferred sentence. But the Payne County Assistant District, Tom Lee, chose to “retain,” he wrote in a note about the report.

Lee testified at the probative hearing that he had a permanent agreement With the Oklahoma County District Prosecutor to pursue or give up the acceleration of convictions deferred for sentences for serious crimes to help with prosecutions. He said he did not talk to anyone from the Oklahoma County Prosecutor’s office before deciding not to follow Brandy’s sentence, but also admitted that he did not remember writing the note about “Hold[ing] off.”

If Brandy’s serious crime had been accelerated, it would not have been eligible for a modification of the sentence of 45 to 35 years, Bass Castro Alves wrote in a recent judicial presentation. This agreement allowed prosecutors to emphasize the lack of brandy of a record of serious crimes for jurors.

“The suppression of prosecutors of their full agreement with Warden Socavó [Tremane’s] Defense and deceived the jury by depriving him of critical information for the evaluation of the jury of Warden’s veracity, credibility and motivations to testify the story he told the jury, “Bass Castro Alves wrote in his proposed factual findings and legal conclusions.

“It allowed prosecutors to convince convincingly in closing in the first stage that Warden was not a” great conspirator “, but it was a girl who” knows[s] A rule, you do what Terman told you to do, ‘”He continued.

In its proposed factual findings and legal conclusions, the State denied any fiscal misconduct in the trial and said that even if there was an unleashed agreement, Treman had not shown that it would have resulted in a different result in the trial.

The judge signed the recommended findings of the State literally.