OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Oklahoma has set execution dates for death row inmate Richard Glossip nine times. The state gave him three “last meals.” Glossip was even married twice while awaiting execution.
Somehow, he’s still there, even after the Supreme Court rejected his challenge to Oklahoma’s lethal injection trial nine years ago.
Now, in another twist, Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general has joined Glossip in an effort to overturn his murder conviction and death sentence in a 1997 murder-for-hire scheme. This unlikely turn has sent Glossip’s case back to the Supreme Court, where the justices will hear arguments on Wednesday.
The court’s review of Glossip’s case comes against a backdrop of a decline in the use of the death penalty and a decline in the number of new death sentences in recent years. At the same time, the court’s conservative majority is generally less open to efforts to halt executions.
It is extremely rare for prosecutors to acknowledge that they, or perhaps their predecessors, made serious mistakes that led to the imposition of death sentences.
But that’s exactly what Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond did, calling for a new trial against Glossip.
Prosecutors in at least three other death penalty cases in Alabama and Texas have urged that death row inmates be given a new trial or at least spared the prospect of execution. The prisoners are: Toforest Johnson in Alabama, and Melissa Lucio and Areli Escobar in Texas. In another similar case, judges denied a last-minute reprieve for Marcellus Williams, whom Missouri executed last week.
“All of these cases tell the public that the death penalty system, as currently administered, cannot be trusted to provide a fair and just outcome,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
Glossip has maintained his innocence in the 1997 Oklahoma City murder of his former boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese, which prosecutors say was a murder-for-hire. Another man, Justin Sneed, admitted to robbing and killing Van Treese, but testified that he only did so after Glossip promised to pay him $10,000. Sneed received a life sentence in exchange for his testimony and was the key witness against Glossip.
Drummond has said he does not believe Glossip is innocent, but the attorney general claims he did not receive a fair trial. One of Drummond’s concerns is that prosecutors knew Sneed had lied on the witness stand about his psychiatric condition and his reason for taking the mood-stabilizing drug lithium. Drummond also cited a box of evidence in the case that was destroyed, including motel receipts, a shower curtain and tape that Glossip’s attorney Don Knight said could have potentially proven Glossip’s innocence.
“The highest elected law enforcement official in Oklahoma has said that Richard Glossip did not receive a fair trial,” said Knight, a veteran death penalty attorney who has consulted on hundreds of death penalty cases. “As far as I know, that is unprecedented.”
Despite Drummond’s misgivings about the trial, an Oklahoma appeals court upheld Glossip’s conviction, and the state’s Pardons and Parole Board deadlocked in a vote to grant him clemency.
At the Supreme Court, Glossip has powerful lawyers on his side, including two former attorneys general, Paul Clement and Seth Waxman, who argue he deserves a new trial. An attorney appointed by the Supreme Court to defend the Oklahoma court’s ruling will argue that Glossip should be put to death.
More than a half-dozen states have also weighed in on the case, asking the Supreme Court to uphold Glossip’s conviction, arguing that they have a “substantial interest” in the federal courts’ deference to state court decisions.
Among those supporting Glossip’s efforts to get a new trial are a group of nearly two dozen current and former state and federal prosecutors who wrote in a letter to the court saying they were disturbed by law enforcement’s actions in the case, including what they characterized as the key witness, Sneed, who was “coached” by a police detective to implicate Glossip.
Glossip’s case provides a vivid illustration of the seemingly endless legal twists and turns that can accompany death penalty cases. In 2015, he was held in a cell next to Oklahoma’s execution chamber, waiting to be strapped to a gurney and injected with drugs that would kill him.
But the scheduled time for his execution came and went, and behind the walls of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, prison officials were struggling after learning that one of the lethal drugs they were given to perform the procedure did not comply with execution protocols.
“That’s just crazy,” Glossip, now 61, said at the time after learning of the drug mix, which eventually led to a nearly seven-year moratorium on executions in Oklahoma.
The case also extends to members of the Van Treese family, the surviving relatives of the victim who was beaten to death with a baseball bat in a room of the motel he owned. Their lawyer wrote in a letter to the Supreme Court that they wanted Glossip’s conviction and sentence upheld.
“In this case, the Van Treese family has patiently waited 10,047 days for justice,” attorney Paul Cassell, a former federal judge, wrote on behalf of the family. “And yet now they are witnessing the spectacle of their case stalling. by the attorney general of their home state admitting a mistake when there is none.”
Among those who remain convinced of Glossip’s guilt in orchestrating Van Treese’s murder-for-hire is former Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater, who reviewed Glossip’s case multiple times and served on the Pardon and Parole Board urged the state to reject leniency towards him, even though the original case was unjustified. persecuted by his predecessors.
“I’ve gone through that case more than once and looked at everything that was written there, and there was nothing that made me question the integrity of that conviction and that death sentence,” Prater said.
A decision is expected early summer.
___
Sherman reported from Washington, DC
