On Monday, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, filed a truly remarkable document in the Supreme Court.
“The State of Oklahoma recently made the difficult decision to confess error and support vacating the conviction of Richard Glossip,” the document reads, referring to a death row inmate scheduled to be executed on May 18. But because other parts of the state government don’t agree, and Oklahoma’s attorney general does not have the power to lift Glossip’s death sentence on his own, Drummond is now begging the Supreme Court of the United States to save Glossip’s life.
It’s a bizarre case, where the state’s top prosecutor, who is also the official empowered to speak on behalf of the state in court, can’t actually stop an execution. But he can use the state’s voice to urge the justices to stop that same state from committing a massive injustice.
The case against Glossip, who was convicted for allegedly hiring a coworker to kill his boss in 1997, now lies in shambles. In 2022, Reed Smith LLP, a law firm commissioned by a committee of state lawmakers, released a 343-page report detailing its investigation into Glossip’s conviction and the many errors that led to Glossip being sentenced to die. Its conclusion is scathing:
The State’s destruction and loss of key evidence before Glossip’s retrial deprived the defense from using the evidence at trial (and has deprived the defense today of the ability to perform forensic testing using DNA and technology advancements), the tunnel‐vision and deficient police investigation, the prosecution’s failure to vet evidence and further distortion of it to fit its flawed narrative, and a cascade of errors and missed opportunities by defense attorneys, fundamentally call into question the fairness of the proceedings and the ultimate reliability of the guilty verdict against Glossip for murder.
This report is bolstered by a separate investigation, conducted at Drummond’s request…
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