OKLAHOMA CITY – Oklahoma has set execution dates nine times for death row inmate Richard Glossip. The state has fed him three “last meals.” Glossip has even been married twice while awaiting execution.
Somehow, he's still here, even after the Supreme Court rejected his challenge to Oklahoma's lethal injection process nine years ago.
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Now, in another twist, Oklahoma's Republican attorney general has joined with Glossip in seeking to overturn his murder conviction and death sentence in a 1997 murder-for-hire scheme. This unlikely turn has put Glossip's case back at the Supreme Court, where the justices will hear arguments Wednesday.
The court’s review of Glossip’s case comes amid a decline in the use of the death penalty and a drop in new death sentences in recent years. At the same time, though, the court’s conservative majority has generally been less open to efforts to halt executions.
It's exceedingly rare for prosecutors to acknowledge they, or perhaps their predecessors, made serious mistakes that led to the imposition of death sentences.
But that's precisely what Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond did, in calling for Glossip to get a new trial.
Prosecutors in at least three other death penalty cases in Alabama and Texas have pushed for death row inmates to be given new trials or at least spared the prospect of being executed. The inmates are: Toforest Johnson in Alabama, and Melissa Lucio and Areli Escobar in Texas. In another similar case, the justices refused a last-minute reprieve for Marcellus Williams, whom Missouri executed last week.
“All of these cases are telling the public that the death penalty system, as it is currently being used, cannot be trusted to end up in a fair and just result,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
Glossip has always maintained his innocence in the 1997 killing in Oklahoma City of his former boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese, in what prosecutors have alleged was a murder-for-hire scheme. Another man, Justin Sneed, admitted robbing and killing Van Treese but testified 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 contends he did not receive a fair trial. Among Drummond’s concerns are that prosecutors knew Sneed lied on the witness stand about his psychiatric condition and his reason for taking the mood-stabilizing drug lithium. Drummond also has cited a box of evidence in the case that was destroyed, including motel receipts, a shower curtain and masking tape that Glossip’s attorney, Don Knight, said could have potentially proven Glossip’s innocence.
“The highest elected law enforcement officer in Oklahoma has said that Richard Glossip did not get a fair trial,” said Knight, a veteran death penalty trial attorney who has consulted on hundreds of capital cases. “As far as I know that’s unprecedented.”
Despite Drummond’s doubts about the trial, an Oklahoma appeals court upheld Glossip’s conviction, and the state’s pardon and parole board deadlocked in a vote to grant him clemency.
At the Supreme Court, Glossip has high-powered lawyers on his side, including two former solicitors general, Paul Clement and Seth Waxman, who are arguing he deserves a new trial. An attorney appointed by the Supreme Court to defend the Oklahoma court ruling will argue that Glossip should be put to death.
More than a half-dozen states also have weighed in on the case, asking the Supreme Court to uphold Glossip’s conviction, arguing that they have a “substantial interest” in federal-court respect for state-court decisions.
Among those who support 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 brief with the court that they were troubled by the actions of law enforcement officers in the case, including what they characterized as the key witness, Sneed, being “coached” to implicate Glossip by a police detective.
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 being 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 scrambling after learning one of the lethal drugs they received to carry out the procedure didn't match the execution protocols.
“That's just crazy,” Glossip, now 61, said at the time after learning of the drug mix-up, which ultimately led to a nearly seven-year moratorium on executions in Oklahoma.
The case also has been trying for members of the Van Treese family, the relatives of the victim who was beaten to death with a baseball bat in a room of the motel he owned. Their attorney wrote in a brief to the high court that they want to see Glossip's conviction and sentence upheld.
“In this case, the Van Treese family has waited patiently for justice for 10,047 days," lawyer Paul Cassell, a former federal judge, wrote on behalf of the family. "And yet, they are now witnessing the spectacle of their case being stalled by the Attorney General for their home state confessing an error where none exists.”
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 who urged the state's Pardon and Parole Board to reject clemency for him even though the original case was prosecuted by his predecessors.
“I went through that case more than once and looked at everything that was there, and there was nothing that caused me to have any question about the integrity of that conviction and that death sentence,” Prater said.
A decision is expected by early summer.
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Sherman reported from Washington, D.C.