The miracle workers who continue to get men off death row

In Oklahoma, the state with the highest execution rate in the country, it is extremely rare for a person sentenced to death to receive clemency. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, only six people in the state have had their death sentences commuted. The last two, Julius Jones in 2021 and Tremane Wood last month, were represented by the same legal team: federal public defender Amanda Bass Castro Alves and investigators Lamont Williams and Rebecca Postyeni of the Arizona Federal Defender’s Capital Habeas Unit.

Jones and Wood are black men who were sentenced to death in cases involving white victims by almost exclusively white juries during the height of death penalty prosecutions in Oklahoma. (Black people are disproportionately sentenced to death, and a 2020 study found that defendants convicted of killing white people were executed at a rate 17 times higher than those convicted of killing black people.) Both men were represented at trial by court-appointed attorneys who would later admit to doing a poor job defending their clients.

Jones was convicted of the murder of Paul Howell in 1999, a crime he has always said he did not commit. No one on his legal team had ever worked on a death penalty case, and his lead attorney later said he was “terrified” due to his “inexperience.” Once Jones’ case reached Bass Castro Alves’ team, they discovered that jurors never heard from Jones’ family, who could have provided an alibi, or from a man who said Jones’ co-defendant admitted to the murder. They also located a juror who recalled that another juror had called Jones the N-word during deliberations and called the trial a waste of time.

Those revelations were not enough to get Jones a new trial, but they did help fuel a national pressure campaign asking for clemency. Ultimately, Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) granted clemency to Jones hours before his scheduled execution.

A few years after Jones’ arrest, prosecutors sought death sentences against Wood and his older brother for the murder of Ronnie Wipf during a botched robbery. Under the state’s felony murder statute, prosecutors did not have to prove who actually killed Wipf to obtain convictions, only that each of them participated in the robbery that led to his death.

Wood denied killing Wipf, but was represented by a lawyer who hardly worked on the case. He was sentenced to death. His older brother, who testified at Wood’s trial that he was the killer, had an experienced capital defense team. He received a life sentence, but committed suicide shortly after his brother became eligible to be executed.

Within the death penalty abolitionist community in Oklahoma, Bass Castro Alves and his team are considered miracle workers. “God has used them before. God can use them again,” the Rev. Keith Jossell, Jones’ spiritual advisor, said at a prayer vigil in Oklahoma City the night before Wood’s execution date.

During a legal visit just before Jones’ scheduled execution in 2021, Wood encouraged their shared legal team not to lose hope. Four years later, it was Jones’ turn to pray for Wood. “You’ve been here before,” Jones told the legal team. “If anyone can do it, you can do it.”

On November 13, minutes before Wood’s murder began, Stitt granted his request for clemency.

News themezone spoke with the team about how they approach research, litigation, community organizing and the growing level of opposition to the death penalty in bright red Oklahoma.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Courtesy of the legal team that represented Julius Jones and Tremane Wood

By the time a case reaches your office, it has gone through multiple unsuccessful rounds of state direct appeal and post-conviction review, limiting the scope of what you can litigate. Can you describe some of those limitations?

Amanda Bass Castro Alves: In federal court, we are limited by the Anti-terrorist law and effective death penaltywhich requires federal courts to give extreme deference to prior state court decisions. Often in federal habeas, we are not arguing about whether a person’s constitutional rights were violated; Instead, we must argue at the threshold whether the state court’s determination that this person’s federal rights were not violated was reasonable or unreasonable for purposes of overcoming the strict procedural barrier under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.

That really limits what we can do, because we rely on what previous attorneys raised in state court on behalf of a client. Often, if claims are not met or were not properly raised, we have to jump through a number of hoops to try to resurrect those claims in federal court.

Even when trying to go back to court with new evidence, we have to overcome strict state procedural barriers. There is a strict 60-day statute of limitations: if you do not return to court within 60 days of the discovery of new evidence, you will be excluded from a death penalty case. And it must also be shown that this new evidence reaches a level that would have shown, with clear and convincing evidence, that this person would not have been convicted or sentenced to death if it were not for this issue that affects his case. So it’s a very difficult hurdle to overcome just to get a hearing in Oklahoma state court on a new evidentiary issue. And there are additional obstacles to getting relief based on those new problems.

This doesn’t stop us from investigating, it doesn’t stop us from trying to go back to court, but it does explain why, in both Julius and Tremane’s cases, both came to the brink of execution before being pardoned, because it is often not possible to obtain redress through the court.

In Tremane’s case, when he first raised claims of ineffective assistance of counsel, it was like, “Oh, you don’t have enough evidence that your trial attorney was incapacitated at the time he represented you.” And then you go out and get all these affidavits from people who say they knew [his lawyer] Johnny Albert the entire time he was representing Tremane and saw him doing drugs and drinking alcohol before work during that time. But when you present this evidence, the judge says, “Well, I should have found this sooner, so I can’t consider it now.”

ABCA: Exactly. And that is the vicious cycle that procedural rules often place death row prisoners like Tremane in when they try to exercise their right to discovery and an evidentiary hearing at the first available opportunity, which Tremane did, and the court did not give him a hearing or the opportunity to conduct discovery that would have allowed him to prove that Johnny Albert was under the influence of drugs at the time he represented him. And then we fast forward to when Rebecca and Lamont do the diligent, hard investigative work and find that evidence, and we present it within 60 days, and the court says, “Well, too late, you should have discovered this evidence when we first prevented you from discovering the evidence.”

Lamont Williams: Finding out that a lawyer was drinking and abusing drugs during a death penalty trial is shocking. Those are the kinds of situations that you read about, but to have this actually happen in a case that you’re working on, and to get multiple affidavits and a lot more evidence to show that this actually happened during the trial, you just think, “These are the kinds of things that courts should consider and that people should be alarmed about and that show when a capital trial goes wrong. This is clear and convincing evidence.”

But then to be struck down by a court so easily for something like timing or procedural hurdles is kind of an embarrassment to the system.

Rebecca Postyeni: And he [financial] resources are delayed. We are exposing ourselves like this after all these procedural barriers allow it. [to be raised in court]but this could have been discovered immediately if the resources had been invested.

Good. You don’t get this kind of strong team with multiple investigators until it’s too late to bring up what’s in court. Given all of these limitations, you have to find creative ways to litigate and even go to court. What is that process like? What do you do when a case first comes across your desk?

L.W.: As investigators, we look for new information and new evidence that was not presented at trial, but we also know the case. As a starting point, you want to review everything that happened at the trial and in the previous trial in terms of court records and transcripts, but we also set out to interview family members and witnesses and sort of retrace the investigation of the crime. We are really learning everything we can about the case, about the witnesses and, of course, about our client.

In some ways, that lays the groundwork for the work that we ultimately end up doing, which is identifying issues that we think deserve attention from the courts.

PR: Just to take advantage of that, I treat a new case like a pretrial case. When I was doing test work, I would just start at the bottom and re-watch everything, read everything, re-research everything. Because in some cases, like the cases of Julius and Tremane, even the basic work of meeting with a client to build a relationship, to obtain information; Both cases have things we learned that could have been developed by simply meeting the client and talking to them, which is very basic, but was not done.

So start over and figure it out from the bottom, and not think about the procedural hurdles that are potentially going to end these problems, because Amanda has a way of being creative.

Amanda, can you talk to us about what it’s like for you?

ABCA: You start to read the record and really get to know the facts of your client’s case and really try to understand everything that happened before, while also building that relationship of trust with your client and getting their perspective. Find out what is corroborated by other things in the dossier nte, versus that for which we have no evidence. So we have to go and try to find evidence that shows how this happened or that shows this or that. Truly making the client the center of their own representation.

There is a lot of deliberation and discussion as a team about what we are finding, the questions we have, what we should investigate, and based on what Rebecca and Lamont investigate and develop factual support, how can we turn that into litigation?

This is how the process played out in both Julius and Tremane’s cases, which allowed us to carry out a rich litigation and, although it was not successful in court, it was really important to the overall effort to show why the pardon was really necessary. Because the courts are not a backup.

Courtesy of the legal team that represented Julius Jones and Tremane Wood

He kind of alluded to this, but many of his clients, including Julius and Tremane, had negative experiences with their trial lawyers. In Tremane’s case, his attorney never visited him in jail, charged him for only two hours of work outside of court, and then temporarily lost his law license after admitting client neglect associated with his struggles with addiction. I imagine that can make it difficult to gain the trust of your clients and their families. How do you overcome that?

L.W.: We spend a lot of time with our clients, learning from them and hearing about their experience and the facts of their case. We cannot simply rely on history. We also have to invest time and energy in going out and talking to people, whether it’s our client, other witnesses who were involved in the crime, or, historically, family witnesses. It’s a huge effort to spend time with these people, face-to-face time. Really listen to their stories and respect their experiences so they feel comfortable sharing them with you.

I learned a lot just working with this particular team. We bring separate skill sets to our team, and it’s been really invaluable to put our heads together and figure things out. As challenging as things have been and at times feeling really impossible, we can lean on each other, listen to each other, support each other and really make it to the other side.

PR: One way that comes to mind to gain clients’ trust at this stage is to simply listen and follow through on what they say. For example, going out and doing work after having discussed a particular topic. Even if it may be nonsense or we think nothing innovative will result.

Illustration: News themezone; Photos: Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board

I was surprised by Tremane’s family’s willingness to discuss with me (and even contribute to the court record) things about his childhood that are painful or unflattering to some of the people providing that information. But once I realized how long they had been building those relationships, it became clear that they were willing to do it because they trust you and the team.

In Tremane’s case, his team presented extensive evidence of collusion and conflicts of interest among multiple judges and prosecutors involved in his late-stage appeals. But the Supreme Court ultimately refused to intervene to stop his execution. Given the courts’ unreliability in rectifying miscarriages of justice in capital cases, his team is simultaneously doing a lot of political and community organizing work while pushing for clemency. Can you talk about what that looks like?

ABCA: In both Julius and Tremane’s cases, we saw the power of community rising up to also support mercy for both. The community that developed around Julius’s case was really the result of “The last defense“, which was produced in 2018 by Viola Davis and her husband Julius Tennon’s company at ABC, which really highlighted the injustice in Julius’ case. And that was a decision that we, as a team, really talked about at length, about whether we would participate in that kind of public effort to elevate Julius’ story. We also talked at length with Julius about that decision.

We saw the fact that people mobilized when it aired in 2018 and people realized how many systemic flaws existed in the Julius case that brought someone innocent to the brink of execution; It mobilized them to action. We saw people in Oklahoma and across the country stand up, develop petitions, write letters to the governor, and organize public events, really doing it in creative ways that we didn’t control or dictate.

Similarly, in Tremane’s case, the community that sprang up around him was actually a function of some truly incredible advocates and community leaders, including Brett Farley at the Oklahoma Catholic Conference, Demetrius Minor at Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty, Joia Thornton, director of the Faith of Color Leaders Coalition, and Ms. Cindy Birdwell, Tremane’s sixth grade teacher. It was just a really wonderful process through which we learned a lot from those community leaders and advocates about what they believed the Oklahoma public and decision makers needed to know to make the right and equitable decision in their case.

L.W.: We learned a lot from the Julius case (the way things just took off after “The Last Defense”) it got out of hand and became more of a community effort, but also working together with our team to fight for Julius.

Amanda talks about movement advocacy and how important it is. Being able to experience that was huge. Being able to learn what we did and bring it to the Tremane case in Oklahoma was a huge help, although we took a very different approach. It was a much more intimate approach. Both are excellent examples of how people become invested, interested, outraged, upset, and concerned about all of these issues when they affect people in their own communities.

PR: Julio has a institute Now you have a whole organization. AND Tremane too. It went beyond them getting a pardon.

Courtesy of the legal team that represented Julius Jones and Tremane Wood

Before Julius’ case, there was tremendous public and national pressure in support of clemency. Kim Kardashian was involved, there were professional athletes asking for clemency, student walkouts, and a lot of Instagram educating people about the case. His plea for clemency came in 2021, a year after the George Floyd protests, when there was more public attention on the ways in which the criminal justice system disproportionately punishes Black people. It was a very different picture when Tremane applied for clemency and in some ways his case was less simple as it was not a case of innocence. How do you think the pardon was achieved?

ABCA: It’s a difficult question. The people of Oklahoma have done so much work on the death penalty process and the ways in which systemic failures exist that it should give leaders pause when approving an execution or death sentence. I’m thinking about the 2017 report of the Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commissionwhich was innovative. A bipartisan group of Oklahomans took the time to study Oklahoma’s death penalty process and issued a powerful report with reform recommendations to truly address issues that were problems in both the Julius and Tremane cases.

I think about that report and the work of the people on that commission along with the people on the ground in Oklahoma who litigate these issues day in and day out: the people at the Oklahoma Capital Habeas Unit, who are literally in the trenches and who, in partnership with people in the community, have been doing the work of educating leaders and pushing for legislative reform. Between the cases of Julius and Tremane, there was a moratorium bill that was being promoted within the legislature. There was also a interim serious murder study which we were grateful to be a part of, where we were able to talk about Tremane’s case and the injustice of his death sentence for a crime of murder, that was in front of Representative JJ Humphrey committee.

So I think that, although in Tremane’s case there wasn’t the same kind of national and international pressure to ask for mercy for him, a lot of the pedagogical work and the day-to-day groundwork to highlight and then try to rectify and educate state leaders about the issues of the death penalty process in Oklahoma really helped Tremane. Because when we went before the clemency board and before Governor Stitt, they had a very deep understanding of some of these systemic failures and then we were able to illustrate how those failures played out in Tremane’s case to result in a wrongful death sentence.

LW: With Julius’ case, perhaps it would be easier for people to address questions of innocence. And Tremane’s case was very different because he participated in the crime. But there were also these deep issues throughout the life of his case, whether we’re talking about the lack of legal representation or the felony murder aspect. That the prosecution said that Tremane was the murderer, but also that [his brother] Jake was the killer. Because Tremane was such a young man and had the history that he had in the juvenile system and the foster care system and his home environment — the really traumatic history that he’s had — it was important for people to know about that. To really know their experience as a person, not to use the “abuse excuse” as people call it, but to show that this is a human being who has gone through a specific experience. And part of that experience is feeling true regret and remorse for what happened. Although he was not innocent, he insisted that no one should die that day.

I’m also thinking about the deep grace shown by the victims of the Tremane crime: both the surviving victim of the robbery and the mother of Ronnie Wipf, who was murdered. I imagine that was very shocking.

ABCA: Yeah.

Illustration: News themezone; Photos: Jessica Schulberg

Can you tell us how Tremane is doing now?

L.W.: Tremane is just grateful to be alive. Grateful that the clemency board gave the recommendation to the governor and that the governor finally granted clemency. He’s been talking about this second chance at life; He called it a renaissance in many ways. He is truly grateful for everyone’s participation. We as a team, but also people like you who have been covering your case so carefully, and the advocates who have worked so hard over the past few years. He is very grateful and knows that it took people’s commitment in many different ways. He appreciates it very much and is eager to take advantage of it. Make the most of this second chance you have in life.