Via Wikimedia Commons
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
By The Vanguard Staff
OKLAHOMA CITY, OK – Criticism was heavy Friday of an Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals 5-0 decision to uphold Richard Glossip’s conviction and death sentence here, refusing to send the case back to district court for a new trial.
Glossip, who has now had nine execution dates over nearly 26 years, is now slated to be executed May 18.
Even tough-on-crime Attorney General Gentner Drummond conceded error in the trial and asked the Court to vacate Glossip’s conviction, citing “material misstatements” by the prosecution’s main witness, and the AG’s own Independent Counsel’s report documenting multiple instances of error that cast doubt on the conviction.
Don Knight, attorney for Glossip, said, “Oklahoma’s elected Attorney General Gentner Drummond found, after conducting his own independent review, that the State’s star witness against Mr. Glossip, Justin Sneed, was not a truthful witness. Without Sneed’s ‘material misstatements’ the outcome of Mr. Glossip’s trial would have been different.”
Knight added, “Since the State now agrees that the only witness to allege that Mr. Glossip was involved in this crime cannot be believed, it is unconscionable for the court to attempt to force the State to move forward with his execution. We cannot permit this longstanding injustice to go unchallenged and will be filing for review of this manifestly unjust ruling in the United States Supreme Court.”
And, Oklahoma Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (OK-CADP) Chair Don Heath said, “The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals’ decision is jaw-dropping. Even when the Attorney General joins with Glossip in asking for the Court to throw out the conviction, it is not enough. the Court set aside the Attorney General’s determination of the importance of the evidence previously withheld by the Oklahoma County District Attorney and substitutes its own evaluation of the evidence.
“The Court relies on the principle of ‘finality of judgment.” The Court apparently believes getting it over with is more important than getting it right. It is Glossip’s life that the Court gives no weight to. This is a shameful day for the Oklahoma court system.”
According to Glossip’s defense, “it is not disputed that another man, Justin Sneed, murdered Barry Van Treese. Mr. Glossip’s conviction is based almost entirely on statements made by Justin Sneed that it now clearly appears he wanted to recant. Mr. Glossip has always maintained his innocence.”
Glossip’s execution has been rescheduled eight times. Earlier this year, the AG joined the defense and filed a joint Motion for Stay of Execution with the Court of Criminal Appeals seeking a delay of the scheduled execution until August 2024.
And, on Jan. 26, AG Drummond announced that he was directing an Independent Counsel to “conduct a comprehensive review of Richard Glossip’s murder conviction and death sentence.”
The defense noted an ad hoc group of Republican Oklahoma state legislators asked for an independent review, which was eventually done by the international law firm Reed Smith, which found that “if a jury was presented with all the evidence now available, no reasonable juror would find Mr. Glossip guilty of murder for hire.”
AG Drummond said he hired, notes the defense, former prosecutor Rex Duncan to review all aspects of the investigation, trial, sentencing and appeals process.
Duncan said, “Circumstances surrounding this case necessitate a thorough review. While I am confident in our judicial system, that does not allow me to ignore evidence. This review helps ensure that justice is served, both to the Van Treese family and the accused.”
Gov. Kevin Stitt granted a 60-day reprieve for Glossip last year, “staying his execution that had been set for September 22, 2022, ‘to allow time for the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to address a pending legal proceeding,’” said the defense, later adding another 60-day reprieve.
In late 2022, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, said the defense, “issued opinions denying Mr. Glossip’s two applications for post-conviction relief, without allowing him to present any new evidence, and thereby defying the requests of sixty-two state legislators, including 45 Republicans, who backed a call for an evidentiary hearing based on newly-discovered evidence.”
The defense notes some of the new evidence comes from the Third, Fourth, and a newly released Fifth Supplement to the Reed Smith independent investigation “which found, among other important issues, that the state’s key witness, Justin Sneed, talked about recanting his testimony over the course of 11 years, both before and after Glossip’s second trial.”
The defense charged Sneed even sent a “handwritten note in which he asks his attorney, ‘Do I have the choice of recanting at any time during my life?’ and a second note stating that his testimony was ‘a mistake.’”
Glossip’s defense team swore that “information should have been, but never was, shared with Mr. Glossip’s attorneys and could have resulted in a different outcome in the trial, which relied heavily on Sneed’s testimony given as part of a plea deal that spared Sneed his own death sentence.
“The investigation by Reed Smith also included a series of conversations Reed Smith lawyers had with Justin Sneed in late August and early September in which he agreed that over the years he had talked to his daughter and his mother about recanting, something he had previously denied,” cites the defense.
Finally, a memo found recently discovered in the District Attorney’s office details, claims the defense, how the trial prosecutor “worked behind the scenes with Sneed’s attorney during Mr. Glossip’s trial to feed Sneed information before he testified, in what appears to be an improper, yet successful, attempt to get Sneed to change his testimony on a key point of evidence. This memo had been withheld from Mr. Glossip’s team, despite a duty to disclose it during the trial, until September 2022.”
