The Supreme Court routinely rejects death row claims, but on Monday the justices took up an appeal that even they couldn’t ignore. They agreed to review the long-running case of Richard Glossip, who has maintained his innocence and whose high court petition was supported — remarkably — by the state of Oklahoma, which secured his death sentence decades ago.
Glossip was convicted based on testimony from the state’s key witness, Justin Sneed, who murdered Barry Van Treese in 1997 and testified that Glossip was also involved. But it later emerged that the state hid from the jury that Sneed had seen a psychiatrist who diagnosed him with a condition that rendered him potentially violent, and the state let Sneed tell the jury he hadn’t seen a psychiatrist. Sneed received a life sentence while Glossip has been fighting off execution dates.
After years of litigation — including a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling against Glossip in 2015 — the state admitted its error to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals and said he should get a new trial. But despite that concession, the state court refused last year to stop his execution, reasoning that the government’s concession alone “cannot overcome the limitations on successive post-conviction review.”
Naturally, Glossip petitioned the Supreme Court, a move that’s often reflexively opposed by prosecutors no matter the circumstances when convictions and sentences are at stake. But here, the Oklahoma attorney general wrote to the justices in support of Glossip’s petition last summer. “Regrettably,” the state’s brief said, “the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals refused to accept the State’s confession of error, instead reaching the extraordinary conclusion that Glossip’s execution must go forward notwithstanding the State’s determination that his conviction is unsustainable.”
So now that the Supreme Court has granted review, does that mean Glossip will prevail — especially given the state’s…
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