Glossip’s case, which will probably be heard next term, has drawn national and international attention because of the bipartisan intervention on his behalf. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner F. Drummond said independent investigations reviewing the case cast serious doubt on whether Glossip received a fair trial on a 1997 murder charge.
The reports said prosecutors deprived Glossip’s lawyers of key information about a crucial witness and failed to correct false testimony in the case.
In its brief order Monday, the Supreme Court said it would consider whether Glossip’s death penalty conviction should be reversed because of the state’s admitted errors.
Glossip was convicted of murdering his boss, Barry Van Treese, in a room of the Best Budget Inn in Oklahoma City, which Van Treese owned and Glossip managed. It is undisputed that Glossip did not swing the bat that bludgeoned Van Treese. That was a drug-addled handyman named Justin Sneed.
After Sneed’s arrest, he said he carried out the assault at the direction of Glossip, who Sneed said promised to pay him $10,000 for the murder. Sneed pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison as part of a negotiated deal.
Glossip’s attorneys said Monday that their client’s conviction must be reversed in part because the state did not disclose crucial evidence about Sneed’s psychiatric condition.
“Mr. Glossip has faced execution nine times, even though the State knew full well that the evidence used to convict him and sentence him to death was false,” his lawyer John Mills said in a statement Monday. “The State now agrees this failure, and the cumulative effect of other errors in the case, require a new trial for Mr. Glossip.”
Drummond, Oklahoma’s attorney general, said in a separate statement that “public confidence in the death penalty requires the highest standard of reliability, so it is appropriate that the U.S. Supreme Court will review this case.”
Glossip has been on death row for more than 25 years and has maintained his innocence. In 2015, he was hours from being executed when prison officials discovered they had received the wrong lethal drug, a mistake that led in part to a seven-year moratorium on executions in the state. The justices ruled 5-4 against Glossip that year in a challenge to the state’s method of execution.
He was again set to be executed last spring when the Supreme Court intervened.
Drummond then asked an Oklahoma appeals court to vacate Glossip’s conviction and said he is entitled to a new trial. The appeals court rejected the state’s request and said Glossip’s execution should go forward.
“That decision cannot be the final word in this case,” Drummond told the justices. “The injustice of allowing a capital sentence to be carried out where the conviction was occasioned by the government’s own admitted failings would be nigh unfathomable.”
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch will not participate in the case, the court’s order said Monday, probably because of his involvement in an earlier proceeding related to Glossip when he was an appeals court judge.