The U.S. Supreme Court on Feb. 25 voted 5–3 to throw out the murder conviction of Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Eugene Glossip after the state admitted the prosecution was flawed.
The Supreme Court ordered a retrial for Glossip after prosecutors, who were obligated to correct false testimony, failed to do so.
Four other justices joined Sotomayor’s opinion. One, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined part of the opinion but dissented in part. Three justices, led by Justice Clarence Thomas, dissented from the majority opinion. Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in the case.
The nation’s highest court decided on Jan. 22 to hear his appeal after suspending his execution in May 2023.
Glossip, 61, was convicted of murdering his employer, Barry Van Treese, in 1997 while employed as manager of an Oklahoma City motel. Justin Sneed, also convicted in the killing, was given life imprisonment without parole in a plea deal that required him to testify against his co-worker. Glossip admitted he assisted Sneed in concealing the murder after the fact but said he didn’t know Sneed intended to kill the victim.
At the time of the murder, Sneed was a methamphetamine addict whom Glossip had hired to do maintenance work at the motel. Sneed told police that Glossip offered him $10,000 to kill Van Treese.
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond discovered that prosecutors had withheld materials from the defense.
These items, collectively known as “Box 8,” revealed that Sneed was allowed to present false testimony without disclosing that he had been prescribed lithium by a psychiatrist for a serious psychiatric condition, Drummond said.
He recommended that Glossip’s murder conviction be set aside because of prosecutorial misconduct, in which case the state would retry him.
Despite that, the Court of Criminal Appeals for Oklahoma ruled against Glossip in April 2023. The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board denied his bid for clemency later the same month.
Last year, Drummond told the Supreme Court that the state had arrived at “the difficult decision to confess error and support vacating the conviction” after evidence suggesting Glossip’s innocence surfaced.
The Oklahoma court’s “decision cannot be the final word in this case. 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,” Drummond told the justices.
