OKLAHOMA CITY, OK — The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) last Wednesday began a new hearing on Glossip v. Oklahoma, considering the argument on whether or not Richard Glossip is to be executed for a crime that even the original prosecutors “are not confident he committed,” according to Reuters News report.
Slate reported Glossip’s life hangs “in the balance” during this oral argument before the SCOTUS, noting his unusual number of execution dates, as it had been stayed (delayed) nine times with him being served his final meal three times, “only to find his life begrudgingly restored to him at the last moment.”
In light of Glossip’s case and the controversial execution of Marcellus Williams in Williams v. Missouri (2003) last month, Sept. 2024, there is an exponentially increasing number of concerned voices on the oversight and negligence of the criminal justice system, according to Slate.
“Like Williams, Richard Glossip had a trial riddled with prosecutorial errors and deceptions and misconduct that any fair court would have prohibited,” wrote Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, adding, “Like Williams, Glossip’s would-be prosecutors do not even seek his execution anymore and are in fact fighting to stop it.”
“Like Williams, Glossip has strong claims that he did not commit this murder,” they continued. “And yet the high court’s fatal rebuff of Williams… suggests that a majority of justices will conclude that this would be a better place if Glossip, too, is executed before we can untangle what went wrong in his deeply flawed prosecution.”
Dana Bazelon, director of policy for Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and author of the Slate story, has emphasized that, while the “wrongful conviction movement” has persuaded many prosecutors to “revisit and even concede relief in past cases,” the problem was with other prosecutors and the courts not involved in the original trials to “double down” on flawed convictions.
“As the concessions (of the wrongful conviction movement) have become more common, they are meeting resistance from the courts and from other prosecutors,” Bazelon wrote.
Bazelon also found it concerning how Glossip’s case, “along with the high court’s recent refusal to stay the execution” of Marcellus Williams, “sheds light on a troubling trend.”
According to Slate, Glossip has spent 27 years in prison awaiting execution after being convicted of murdering his boss, Barry Van Treese, at the Best Budget Inn in Oklahoma City based “solely on the uncorroborated testimony of his co-defendant Justin Sneed.”
Slate said Sneed would later claim Glossip “put him up to it” in murdering the victim in 1997.
However, court records indicated that Sneed testified “as part of his plea deal” to avoid the death penalty. In the end, all parties involved, according to Slate, agreed it was Sneed who “bludgeoned the victim to death with a bat.”
Records also showed that Glossip would have already been executed already by this point in time, but in 2023, “the Oklahoma City district attorney’s office that had prosecuted him turned over evidence” revealing Sneed’s diagnosis of a “serious mental illness” and his intentional retraction of his testimony.
According to Bazelon, these were “facts the office was aware of at Glossip’s trial but did not disclose.”
In 2023, the Oklahoma City DA agreed Glossip was “entitled to a new trial,” acknowledging “the credibility of the only witness against him had crumbled,” and also admitted that he was denied a fair trial, according to Slate.
However, despite this statement, Glossip continues to await execution.
“Official after official” has “opined that Glossip deserves a new trial,” wrote Bazelon, citing not only the DA, but also “the Oklahoma attorney general, 62 Oklahoma state legislators, and two independent investigators.”
Yet, the Oklahoma Criminal Court of Appeals, according to records, refused to overturn his conviction last year.
“Instead, the court instructed the state to set an execution date because… Glossip had failed to prove his innocence by clear and convincing evidence.” The Supreme Court of Oklahoma had a January 2024 hearing, but it only led to Glossip’s execution date being stayed to the latest ninth time.
Bazelon weighed in on her critique of this pervasive issue of conviction concessions, highlighting the common event of when one prosecutor agrees that a “conviction should be overturned,” another prosecutor “(typically the state’s attorney general)” steps forward to “render a separate opinion.”
“Many wrongfully convicted defendants’ chances at freedom are either delayed or denied because even when the prosecutor who put them in jail is ready to acknowledge that the conviction cannot stand, there is a second prosecutor standing behind the first one, saying the opposite,” Bazelon wrote.
Courts often, Bazelon writes, “welcome the intervention of another prosecutor to argue for the conviction,” adding, “They believe that this will allow them to hear both sides of the argument” as part of the “adversarial system” that serves as the “ultimate way to ascertain the truth.”
“In reality, however, there is no reason to believe that the court must hear from someone defending a conviction that both sides have agreed is wrongful,” Bazelon argued, pointing out this system “ignores the reality that many hearings in criminal court proceed by agreement” in the first place, which includes plea deals.
While this specific aspect of the system has been deemed “sensible” in theory, advocates have painted a much more complicated matter in which it “can cause a paradoxical decrease in the accuracy of the outcome,” simply because more lawyers are assigned.
“It can lead to unnecessary complexity and escalated disputes and waste government resources,” Bazelon explained, adding, “It should not be so hard for the wrongfully convicted people to win their freedom.”
“Even if SCOTUS rules in Glossip’s favor, his case sets the bar impossibly high,” Bazelon warned. “How can the average wrongfully convicted defendant, who cannot dream of receiving the attention and resources that Glossip has garnered, hope to prevail?”
