Oklahoma Sets November Execution Date for Air Force Veteran Jim Pavatt Amid Claims of Wrongful Conviction
Pavatt, who served nearly 22 years in the Air Force and rose to the rank of master sergeant, was convicted and sentenced to death for the 2001 killing of Rob Andrew in Oklahoma City. His execution is scheduled for the day after Veterans Day.
Pavatt has maintained his innocence, and his attorneys argue that no physical evidence or eyewitness testimony established that he was at the crime scene when Andrew was killed.
“Jim Pavatt was convicted by a rogue prosecutor who repeatedly lied and later admitted that a confession from Jim was bogus,” Assistant Federal Public Defender Hunter S. Labovitz said. “This case should not be scheduled for execution given the material questions yet to be answered.”
Pavatt’s defense also maintains that his trial attorney failed to present available witnesses who could have challenged key portions of the prosecution’s case.
“Never in trouble in his life previously, Jim was a highly decorated Air Force master sergeant, a Baptist church deacon and Sunday school teacher who has been a trusted law clerk while incarcerated and a model prisoner,” Labovitz said.
According to Pavatt’s defense, the police investigation generated approximately 8,000 pages of records but produced no hair, fingerprints, blood, saliva, clothing fibers, or eyewitness testimony placing Pavatt at the crime scene.
His attorneys also dispute forensic evidence involving a bullet recovered from a vehicle connected to Pavatt.
They contend prosecutors had received a pretrial report from an FBI expert concluding that the bullet was “analytically distinguishable” from projectiles recovered at the crime scene. Despite that report, prosecutors presented testimony from a state chemist who had not independently tested the evidence but testified about purported consistencies between the samples, according to the defense.
Pavatt’s attorneys further allege prosecutors repeatedly suggested to jurors that the evidence constituted a “match.”
The forensic technique itself was subsequently abandoned by the FBI. In September 2005, two years after Pavatt’s trial, the FBI announced it would stop conducting comparative bullet lead examinations.
The decision followed scrutiny of the technique by the National Academy of Sciences, which concluded that “neither scientists nor bullet manufacturers are able to definitively attest to the significance of an association made between bullets in the course of a bullet lead examination.”
Pavatt’s attorneys contrast the absence of physical evidence placing him at the scene with evidence involving his co-defendant, Brenda Andrew, who was present when her husband was killed.
At Andrew’s subsequent trial, prosecutors told jurors that she “actually hated” her husband and had told one of his co-workers that she “would see him dead.”
Rob Andrew’s pastor testified that Andrew had “expressed concerns about Brenda Andrew trying to kill him” and did not feel safe even “spending one night in his home.”
According to Pavatt’s defense, expert testimony and physical evidence also challenged Brenda Andrew’s claim that an unknown intruder had shot both her and her husband.
The defense points in particular to arguments made by prosecutors during Brenda Andrew’s trial, which occurred after Pavatt’s. The same prosecutor involved in Pavatt’s case argued that “the evidence is clear": Brenda Andrew was the person who shot and killed her husband.
Pavatt’s attorneys argue that the state’s positions in the two trials were inconsistent and undermine the reliability of his conviction.
The defense has also raised questions about a confession from another man, Zjaiton Wood, which Pavatt’s jury was not permitted to hear.
Before Pavatt’s capital trial, Wood repeatedly claimed orally and in writing that he had killed Rob Andrew, according to Pavatt’s attorneys. Wood sent letters to the trial judge, prosecutor, and Pavatt’s attorney and told an Oklahoma County sheriff’s officer, “I was the one who shot [Rob Andrew].”
When an Oklahoma City police homicide investigator later interviewed the officer, the officer confirmed that Wood had confessed, according to Pavatt’s defense.
The trial judge nevertheless excluded Wood’s alleged confession from Pavatt’s trial after determining it was insufficiently reliable, preventing jurors from hearing either directly from Wood or from the sheriff’s officer who reported receiving the confession.
Pavatt’s defense argues that subsequent proceedings further call that decision into question.
During a pretrial hearing in Brenda Andrew’s later case, a prosecutor said, “we can show an indicia of reliability because [Zjaiton Wood] has testified under oath that he did, in fact, write the letter and that it is, in fact, true.”
That prosecutor had previously prosecuted Wood and was present when he testified during his co-defendant’s case in 2004, according to Pavatt’s attorneys.
“I did the crime,” Wood testified regarding the offense for which Pavatt and Brenda Andrew had been charged.
According to Pavatt’s defense, prosecutors did not challenge that assertion during cross-examination and introduced Wood’s confession as an exhibit after he acknowledged that the document was in his handwriting.
Pavatt’s attorneys have also accused prosecutors of misleading his jury about an alleged confession attributed to Pavatt himself.
According to the defense, the lead prosecutor knew before Pavatt’s trial that the district attorney had reviewed the purported confession letter and considered it a “concoction.”
During Brenda Andrew’s subsequent prosecution, Pavatt’s attorneys say, the same prosecutor sought to exclude the letter, arguing that it could not be “determine[d] whether [the statements that are in the letter] are true.”
The prosecutor later characterized Pavatt’s alleged written confession as “concocted” and “bogus” during Andrew’s trial, according to the defense.
Pavatt’s attorneys also point to what they characterize as conflicting prosecution theories about who actually shot Rob Andrew.
At Pavatt’s trial, the prosecution argued that Pavatt could have been the shooter. Months later, during Brenda Andrew’s trial, the same prosecutor argued that “the evidence is clear” Andrew “was the one who actually shot Rob Andrew and killed him.”
In closing argument in Andrew’s case, another prosecutor told jurors that the last thing Rob Andrew saw before his death was “her face over the barrel of a shotgun.”
The defense argues those statements, combined with the disputed forensic evidence, excluded a third-party confession and absence of physical evidence placing Pavatt at the scene, raise substantial questions about the reliability of his death sentence.
Pavatt’s attorneys have also placed his military, religious, and professional history at the center of their effort to prevent his execution.
Before his prosecution, Pavatt had no previous arrest record, according to his defense.
He joined the Air Force in 1974 and served for nearly 22 years, eventually becoming a master sergeant and commanding as many as 400 personnel. He received numerous military honors, including the Meritorious Service Medal, and his superiors described him as an outstanding leader and among the top 1% of sergeants, according to his attorneys.
Pavatt was also a longtime church member who served as a Sunday school teacher and Baptist deacon.
He graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a 3.5 GPA and later worked as a life insurance salesman, eventually supervising approximately a dozen agents.
Pavatt has now been incarcerated for approximately 25 years, including about 23 years on death row. His attorneys say he has maintained a clean disciplinary record and has worked as a prison law clerk assisting other incarcerated people with legal research.
With the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals setting his execution for Nov. 12, Pavatt’s attorneys are continuing to argue that unresolved questions surrounding the prosecution evidence, competing theories of the killing, and excluded evidence make carrying out the death sentence unjustified.
“This case should not be scheduled for execution given the material questions yet to be answered,” Labovitz said.
Source: davisvanguard.org, Staff, August 30, 2026
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but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
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