McALESTER, Okla. (AP) — An Oklahoma inmate whose life was spared by Gov. Kevin Stitt just moments before he was to receive a lethal injection on Thursday was later found unresponsive inside his cell and rushed to receive medical attention, prison officials said.
Guards found Tremane Wood, 46, unresponsive in his cell during a routine check hours after his sentence was commuted and after he had visited with his attorneys, said Department of Corrections spokeswoman Kay Thompson. It was determined that dehydration and stress caused Wood’s medical event, and he was stable and alert Thursday evening, prison officials said.
Wood told Thompson he was alone in his cell when he went to lie down and believes he may have rolled off his bunk after losing consciousness, according to a recorded interview with Wood released by the Department of Corrections after he was taken to a hospital.
“I didn't have all my senses,” Wood said in the recording. “I woke up in the infirmary with my head busted and my lip busted, and that's pretty much it right there.”
Wood said he hadn't eaten anything since the previous day, and that he didn't try to harm himself.
At the end of the recording, Wood said: “Tell Gov. Stitt I said ‘thank you.’”
Messages left late Thursday with Wood's attorney were not immediately returned.
Wood was waiting in a cell next to Oklahoma's death chamber Thursday morning when he learned Stitt commuted his sentence to life without parole.
Family members of the victim, who who grew up in a Hutterite religious community in Montana, supported Wood's clemency. The governor cited their “Christian forgiveness and love," in a statement announcing his decision.
Wood was sentenced for fatally stabbing Ronnie Wipf, 19, during a botched robbery in 2002, but Wood maintained that the actual killer was his brother, who died serving a life sentence. It is the second time the Republican governor has granted clemency during his nearly seven years in office.
“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,” the governor said.
Stitt's order said Wood shall not be eligible to apply for or be considered for a commutation, pardon or parole for the rest of his life.
Stitt imposed similar conditions in 2021 after granting clemency to death row inmate Julius Jones. The governor rejected clemency recommendations in four other cases. A total of 16 men have been executed during Stitt’s time in office.
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond was "disappointed that the governor has granted clemency for this dangerous murderer, but respect that this was his decision to make,” he said in a statement.
Wood's attorney, Amanda Bass Castro Alves, said she and her legal team are “profoundly grateful."
“This decision honors the wishes of Mr. Wipf’s family and the surviving victim, and we hope it allows them a measure of peace," her statement said.
Several Republican lawmakers also had urged Stitt to grant Wood clemency.
Oklahoma’s Pardon and Parole Board voted 3-2 last week to recommend that the governor grant clemency.
George Burnett, one of the original prosecutors, said he's concerned that a five-member parole board can have such a profound impact on a case that has been litigated for more than 20 years. He also asserted that the evidence suggests Tremane Wood was the one who fatally stabbed Wipf.
In addition to arguing that Wood's brother was the actual killer, Castro Alves told the panel Wood had an ineffective trial attorney who was drinking heavily at the time and who did little work on the case. She also said trial prosecutors improperly concealed from jurors the benefits that witnesses received in exchange for their testimony. Wood’s attorneys had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the execution on these grounds, but were denied.
Prosecutors painted Wood as a dangerous criminal who continued to participate in gang activity and commit crimes while in prison, including buying and selling drugs, using contraband cellphones and ordering attacks on other inmates.
Wood, who testified to the panel via video link from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, accepted responsibility for his prison misconduct and his participation in the robbery, but denied being the one who killed Wipf.
“I’m not a monster. I’m not a killer. I never was and I never have been,” Wood said.
This Feb. 9, 2023, photo provided by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections shows Tremane Wood, who was sentenced to die for the stabbing death of a man during a robbery in 2001. (Oklahoma Department of Corrections via AP)
NEW YORK (AP) — Global leaders have been scrambling to contain the rising cost of oil and gasoline since the start of the Iran war, which took a record amount of oil off the market when tankers full of crude were stranded in the Persian Gulf and military strikes damaged refineries, pipelines and export terminals.
Hoping to ease some pain for consumers, President Donald Trump and other heads of state have been pulling on various levers, launching more oil on the market in a bid to calm the chaos.
A group of 32 nations that are members of the International Energy Agency began releasing the largest volume of emergency oil reserves in its history: 400 million barrels. Trump is tapping into oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve while lifting sanctions on Russian and Iranian crude and temporarily waiving the Jones Act, a maritime law that requires ships carrying goods between U.S. ports to be U.S.-flagged.
But despite those maneuvers, crude oil surpassed $100 a barrel and gasoline is selling for $4.06 a gallon on average in the U.S. While the stopgaps are helping, they're not adding up to enough oil to replace what's stranded, experts say.
“They're all incremental,” said Mark Barteau, professor of chemical engineering and chemistry at Texas A&M University. "You’re talking about these different patches being at the level of maybe 1 to 2 million barrels a day each, and you’ve got to get to 20, so it’s hard to see those actually adding up to the numbers that are needed. And then the question is, how long can you sustain those?”
Before the war began, roughly 15 million barrels of crude oil and 5 million barrels of oil products passed daily through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf, amounting to about 20% of global oil consumption, according to the International Energy Agency.
In addition to that loss, some oil producing nations in the Middle East have halted oil production because they can't ship fuel out of the Gulf and their storage tanks are full. That's taken about 10 million more barrels per day off the market, the IEA said.
Then there are the eight countries around the Persian Gulf that together hold about 50% of global oil reserves. Under normal circumstances, they coordinate closely to raise or lower their output to keep prices steady, said Jim Krane, energy research fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute. Usually Saudi Arabia steps in to bring spare oil to market and calm things down, he said.
“But all of that spare capacity is also bottled up inside the Persian Gulf right now and it can’t get to market either,” Krane said. “So the main emergency response system that we have is also blocked.”
The IEA said in its recent report that “the resumption of transit through the Strait of Hormuz is the single most important action to return to stable oil and gas flows and reduce the strains on markets and prices.”
Barring that, world leaders are grasping for ways to free up more oil.
Some nations have found workarounds to move oil out of the Gulf. Saudi Arabia is using its East-West pipeline, which stretches from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, to transfer about 5 million barrels per day out of the Gulf, said Michael Lynch, distinguished fellow at Energy Policy Research Foundation, a non-partisan institution focused on energy and economics. But the nation was already using that pipeline to transport oil, so it doesn’t have a lot of spare room to move oil from stranded tankers.
Trump also temporarily lifted sanctions on approximately 140 million barrels of Iranian oil that was already in transit. But that didn’t add oil to the market — it just widened the pool of potential buyers, said Daniel Sternoff, senior fellow at the Columbia Center on Global Energy Policy.
Typically, most Iranian oil was bought by private refiners in China, who purchased it at a steep discount, Sternoff said. But with sanctions lifted, others could scramble to buy the oil, which in turn raises its price to the benefit of Iran, he said.
“As soon as you are moving to waive sanctions on your adversary with whom you’re fighting a military conflict, to do something in their benefit, it just shows you that you are running out of options to try to prevent a rise in the price of oil,” Sternoff said.
The decision to lift sanctions on Russian oil could have more impact, because Russia had been storing unpurchased oil in tankers, Sternoff said. “By waiving sanctions, it will allow those barrels to clear.”
Trump’s temporary waiver of the Jones Act to allow foreign ships to temporarily transport goods between U.S. ports could potentially help ease natural gas prices by enabling companies to more efficiently ship liquefied natural gas from the Gulf Coast to New England.
But experts don’t expect the waiver to significantly impact the price of oil or gasoline. “It’s helpful, but not a game changer,” Lynch said.
The U.S. is a major oil producer, and exports more oil than it imports. But like any other oil producing nation, it can't just ramp up production instantly to fill the void.
“If the U.S. were to try to make up the global shortfall, we would need to nearly double our production,” Barteau said. “We couldn’t drill wells that fast even if we wanted to.”
Increasing domestic production by even 1 million barrels per day, a feat the U.S. accomplished during the shale boom, would be hard to duplicate, Lynch said.
“If we run every drilling rig right now, what happens a week from now when the war is over and the price goes back down $20?” Lynch asked. “People don’t want to develop long-term production based on a short-term price spike.”
Halting exports and using that oil within the U.S. wouldn't bring down gasoline prices either, experts say.
For one, oil is traded on a global market, so events happening halfway around the globe impact prices for everyone.
In addition, the U.S. doesn't produce enough of the type of oil its refineries process. It produced about 13.7 million barrels per day of oil at the end of 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration. And refineries processed about 16.3 million barrels per day that year, relying on imports to fill in the gaps, according to the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), a trade association.
That's because nearly 70% of U.S. refineries are set up to process heavy, sour crude, according to AFPM. But much of the oil produced in the U.S. is light, sweet crude, which was unlocked during the shale revolution.
“They need different crudes than the ones that are being produced right next to them now,” Krane said.
As a result, just 60% of the crude oil processed in U.S. refineries is extracted domestically, according to the AFPM. And retooling domestic refineries would cost billions of dollars, the group said. It also would require shutting down the refinery for a period of time, which generally raises gasoline prices.
“A lot of people like the IEA are making the point that this is the biggest oil crisis ever, which is partly true, partly an exaggeration, depending on how you count things,” Lynch said. “A lot of it has to do with how long does this last ... if it goes on for another six weeks we get to be in some serious trouble.”
A sign shows the price of gas at a store, Tuesday, March 31, 2026, in Freeport, Maine. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)
The sun has set behind a gas station in Frankfurt, Germany, Tuesday, March 31, 2026. (AP Photo/Michael Probst)
A worker collects engine oil as he works at a degassing station in Zubair oil field, whose operations have being reduced due to the Mideast war triggered by the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran, near Basra, Iraq, Saturday, March 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)
Gas prices are displayed at a Chevron gas station, in downtown Los Angeles, Tuesday, March 31, 2026. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
