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.
Glossip, 62, was convicted of murdering his employer, Barry Van Treese, in 1997 while working 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. The Supreme Court granted him a stay of execution on May 5, 2023.
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.
Sotomayor wrote in the high court’s opinion that the state’s disclosure of Box 8 showed that Sneed had bipolar disorder.
Given his ailment, Sneed’s drug use “could have caused impulsive outbursts of violence.” The state acknowledged that “a jail psychiatrist prescribed Sneed lithium to treat that condition, and that the prosecution allowed Sneed falsely to testify at trial that he had never seen a psychiatrist.”
“Because Sneed’s testimony was the only direct evidence of Glossip’s guilt, the jury’s assessment of Sneed’s credibility was material and necessarily determinative,” she wrote.
The state then confessed error before the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals and conceded that prosecutors’ “failure to correct Sneed’s testimony violated Napue v. Illinois … which held that prosecutors have a constitutional obligation to correct false testimony,” Sotomayor wrote.
That 1959 Supreme Court ruling held that a prosecutor’s intentional use of false testimony violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Oklahoma court then misinterpreted Napue and ruled against Glossip, finding the state’s admission was not “based in law or fact,” Sotomayor said.
“Because the prosecution violated its obligations under Napue, we reverse the judgment below and remand the case for a new trial,” she wrote.
Barrett wrote that she largely agreed with the Supreme Court’s analysis, but did not believe it was appropriate for the justices to set aside Glossip’s conviction.
The lower court “did not make factual findings on the most important questions, and the record is open to multiple plausible interpretations.”
Instead, the Supreme Court should have corrected the lower court’s misinterpretation of Napue and returned the case to that court for reconsideration, Barrett said. “Instead, the Court has drawn its own conclusions about what the record shows, thereby exceeding its role.”
In his dissenting opinion, Thomas wrote that Glossip’s case should have ended when the lower court denied his application on both merit-based and procedural grounds and a state board denied clemency. Justice Samuel Alito joined the dissent in full, while Barrett joined several parts of it.
The Supreme Court lacks authority to “override these denials” and instead “stretches the law at every turn to rule in [Glossip’s] favor,” Thomas wrote.
Glossip’s attorney, Don Knight, hailed the new ruling.
“We are thankful that a clear majority of the court supports long-standing precedent that prosecutors cannot hide critical evidence from defense lawyers and cannot stand by while their witnesses knowingly lie to the jury,” Knight told The Epoch Times.
“Today was a victory for justice and fairness in our judicial system. Rich Glossip, who has maintained his innocence for 27 years, will now be given the chance to have the fair trial that he has always been denied.”
Drummond also praised the decision.
“Our justice system is greatly diminished when an individual is convicted without a fair trial, but today we can celebrate that a great injustice has been swept away,” he told The Epoch Times.
“I am pleased the high court has validated my grave concerns with how this prosecution was handled, and I am thankful we now have a fresh opportunity to see that justice is done.”
