If the United States Supreme Court had gotten its way, Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip would have been executed long ago. In 2015, it turned down his challenge to the constitutionality of Oklahoma’s lethal-injection protocol and seemed to clear the way for the state to execute him.
Glossip, one of this nation’s best-known death row inmates, was convicted in 2004 for his role in an alleged murder-for-hire plot in the 1997 death of Barry Van Treese, who owned the motel where Glossip was the manager.
Despite the fact that he has consistently maintained his innocence and highlighted numerous disturbing problems in the state’s handling of his case, Glossip has been on the verge of execution three times before. He has been served three separate last meals. His next execution date is May 18.
But on Thursday, in a startling turnaround, Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General, Gentner F. Drummond, acknowledged what Glossip has been saying all along. He asked Oklahoma’s Court of Criminal Appeals to call off the execution, vacate Glossip’s conviction, and grant him a new trial. Drummond’s filing is not just a confession of the state’s and the Supreme Court’s error in the Glossip case; it is a vivid portrait of a death penalty system in disarray.
AdvertisementThat this confession of error happened in Oklahoma is remarkable. Oklahoma, after all, has long been one of America’s death penalty hotbeds. Over the last half-century, only Texas has put more people to death than the Sooner state. In 1977, Oklahoma became the first state in the country to authorize lethal injection as its method of execution, and seven years ago it achieved another death-penalty first when it added nitrogen hypoxia to its execution menu. In a 2016 statewide referendum, 66 percent of voters supported retaining the death penalty.
Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementThis is not to say that everything has been rosy for the state’s death penalty supporters. During the 1980s and 1990s, in a preview of the problems that occurred in the Glossip case, the state’s largest county, Oklahoma County, was the scene of several serious miscarriages of justice that led to the exoneration and release of several people from death row. And in 2014, the state was the site of one of America’s most notorious botched executions when it tried to put Clayton Lockett to death.
AdvertisementAs bad as all that was, it is the Glossip case that has been the real thorn in the side of Oklahoma’s death penalty. According to journalist and legal scholar Lincoln Caplan, so troubling is the case that if America eventually ends capital punishment, the Glossip case “is likely to be a significant point of reference in accounts of how it happened.”
Before looking at Thursday’s turn of events, let’s briefly review his case. Glossip allegedly hired his co-defendant, Justin Sneed, to kill Van Treese. Sneed, a maintenance man at Van Treese’s motel, stabbed him and killed him with a baseball bat. He confessed to the crime soon after he was arrested. Sneed took a deal that the prosecution offered him: plead guilty and testify against Glossip in exchange for a life-in-prison sentence. In order to elevate this killing to a death penalty case, the state needed it to meet certain factors. One of them was that the crime had been a murder-for-hire. Charging Glossip provided the state the opportunity to do that and Sneed provided the testimony.
Advertisement AdvertisementSuch plea bargains play an important role in the prosecution of death cases. Glossip’s is one of the countless death cases in which one person gets off with a lighter sentence after providing incriminating evidence against someone else.
AdvertisementGlossip, who had never before been arrested, refused a plea bargain that would have spared his life. He was subsequently tried and sentenced to death. Soon after his conviction, Glossip and his lawyers alleged that his trial had been tainted by prosecutorial misconduct and serious procedural errors. His first conviction was vacated and he was granted a new trial. That trial, again, was filled with problems and, again, he was convicted and sentenced to death.
During his time on death row, Glossip’s case has attracted attention from a wide range of people, including some of Oklahoma’s most conservative Republican legislators, who worried that if the state put him to death it would be executing an innocent man. In 2021 those legislators commissioned an independent investigation of the handling of his case. It was carried out by Reed Smith, a prestigious Oklahoma City law firm. After detailing numerous problems in the state’s handling of the Glossip case, the investigation concluded that “no reasonable juror hearing the complete record would have convicted Richard Glossip of first-degree murder” and that his trial could not “provide a basis for the government to take the life of Richard E. Glossip.”
Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementNonetheless, the state remained steadfast in its determination to do what the Supreme Court made possible eight years ago; namely, to execute him. That is, until Thursday. In his court filing, Drummond explained that the state’s about-face was the result of another independent review of the Glossip case that his office had commissioned in January of this year. That review offers a devastating account of prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective assistance of counsel, and numerous other violations of Glossip’s rights. For anyone familiar with the death penalty system, not just in Oklahoma but in every death penalty state, that account is as unsurprising as it is shocking.
AdvertisementYet Drummond refused to concede that Glossip was “innocent of any charge made against him.” He disagreed with some of the independent review’s findings. But he detailed numerous conclusions from that investigation as the basis for the state’s reversal of its longstanding efforts to kill Glossip and his admission that doing justice requires setting aside the verdict in his case.
AdvertisementAmong the most serious problems that Drummond acknowledged was the fact that Sneed, the state’s star witness, made “material misstatements to the jury.” In light of them, Drummond told the court that “the state is not comfortable asserting that the outcome of the trial would have been the same had Sneed testified accurately.” He also conceded that the state had seriously mishandled the evidence in Glossip’s case. Even worse, the attorney general told the court that the prosecution had destroyed potentially exculpatory evidence in order to keep it from Glossip’s defense lawyers.
The lessons of Glossip’s case are even more important today than they were when it first reached the Supreme Court. Our conservative-dominated, death penalty–loving court is notoriously impatient with allegations of the kind that Glossip has been making for almost 20 years. It is eager to get on with the business of executing the people on death row.
Alas, in our error-prone death penalty system, speed kills the innocent as well as the guilty. The Glossip case is a vivid reminder that when it comes to capital punishment, justice delayed is not justice denied.
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