Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma, a Republican who supports the death penalty, on Thursday spared the life of a death-row prisoner just before his scheduled execution by lethal injection.
The death-row inmate, Tremane Wood, 46, had already had his last meal — catfish from a local restaurant — when staff members knocked on his cell door outside the death chamber at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester to tell him the governor had reduced his sentence to life without parole, according to Mr. Wood’s lawyer, Amanda Bass Castro-Alves.
“He collapsed on the floor of his cell and was overcome with emotion and gratitude to Governor Stitt for sparing his life, and for giving him a second chance and delivering justice for the first time in 20 years,” Ms. Castro-Alves said in an interview.
Mr. Wood was scheduled to die at 10 a.m. on Thursday for his role in the fatal stabbing of a man, Ronnie Wipf, during a botched robbery at an Oklahoma City motel in 2002. Earlier on Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a request by Mr. Wood’s lawyer to stay the execution.
Mr. Stitt said in a statement that he had accepted the recommendation of the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board, which voted 3 to 2 last week to reduce Mr. Wood’s sentence to life without parole.
It was only the second time that Mr. Stitt had stepped in to stop an execution in his nearly seven years in office. In 2021, he reduced the death sentence of Julius Jones, who was convicted of first-degree murder in 2002, to life without parole.
Mr. Stitt has rejected the Parole Board’s clemency recommendations in four other death-penalty cases. Seventeen prisoners in Oklahoma have been executed since Mr. Stitt took office, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Mr. Stitt indicated in his statement that he was concerned about a disparity in sentencing in Mr. Wood’s case. Mr. Wood’s older brother, Zjaiton Wood, who was tried separately and also convicted of murdering Mr. Wipf, had been given a sentence of life without parole.
“This action reflects the same punishment his brother received for their murder of an innocent young man and ensures a severe punishment that keeps a violent offender off the streets forever,” Governor Stitt said. He added, “I pray for the family of Ronnie Wipf and for the surviving victim, Arnie; they are models of Christian forgiveness and love.”
A small group of Mr. Wood’s relatives and supporters wept and embraced outside the state penitentiary as word of the governor’s decision spread, video posted by KOCO, an Oklahoma news station, showed. “We did it!” one of them cried.
Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, the church’s public policy arm, said the governor’s decision was “a big surprise, especially given the track record he has in office of not agreeing with clemency.”
Mr. Wood was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in 2004, even though his older brother admitted to having stabbed Mr. Wipf, 19, Ms. Castro-Alves said. The older brother died by suicide in prison in 2019.
Ms. Castro-Alves said on a podcast last year that even though prosecutors had sought the death penalty for both brothers, a judge had appointed three experienced lawyers and two investigators from the Oklahoma public defender agency to represent Zjaiton Wood and only a solo practitioner to represent Tremane Wood.
Mr. Wood’s lawyer “admitted later that he didn’t do much at all to represent Tremane or to investigate his case,” Ms. Castro-Alves said. She said Mr. Wood’s legal team had found an invoice showing that the lawyer had worked only 80 hours on his case and that 60 of those hours were during the trial itself.
The disparate sentences — death for Tremane Wood and life without parole for his older brother — were “directly traceable to the resources that went into defending Tremane as opposed to his brother,” Ms. Castro-Alves said on the podcast, which was hosted by Equal Justice USA, a nonprofit that opposes the death penalty.
She had also argued in legal appeals that prosecutors had hidden deals they had struck with witnesses in exchange for their testimony against Mr. Wood.
The Oklahoma attorney general’s office said in a Supreme Court filing that those claims were “based on misrepresentations of the facts” and that the state had demonstrated at a hearing that it “did not have undisclosed agreements with witnesses.”
Gentner Drummond, Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general, had opposed a commutation for Mr. Wood. He said in a statement on Thursday that while in prison, Mr. Wood had used cellphones to “distribute drugs and engage in gang violence.”
“I am disappointed that the governor has granted clemency for this dangerous murderer, but respect that this was his decision to make,” Mr. Drummond said. “My office will continue working to ensure that Tremane Wood remains behind bars and that the public is protected from him.”
Mr. Wood, speaking to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board last week, expressed sympathy for Mr. Wipf’s family.
“They aren’t able to watch him grow up and have his own family,” Mr. Wood said, according to NonDoc, an Oklahoma news outlet. “That still weighs heavily on me to this day. I regret my role in everything that happened that night.”
Michael Levenson covers breaking news for The Times from New York.
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