Supreme Court Rules Oklahoma Can’t Execute Inmate After State Attorney General Repudiates Conviction

 A divided Supreme Court overruled an Oklahoma court that ordered Richard Glossip executed over the objection of the state’s attorney general, who determined the inmate’s conviction for a 1997 murder was too flawed to justify putting him to death.

Glossip, an Oklahoma City motel manager, was convicted in the murder of his boss, Barry Van Treese, who was beaten to death with a baseball bat in one of the rooms on his property, the Best Budget Inn. No forensic evidence linked Glossip to the crime. The conviction rested almost entirely on the testimony of Justin Sneed, a handyman who admitted beating Van Treese to death, claiming that Glossip hired him to commit the murder.

Sneed testified against Glossip in exchange for a life sentence rather than face the death penalty. After Glossip turned down a similar plea bargain, the Oklahoma County district attorney pursued capital charges. Glossip’s 1998 conviction was thrown out on appeal, but the death verdict from a 2004 retrial stuck.

Glossip maintained his innocence, and a pro bono attorney uncovered many flaws in the police investigation and prosecution of the case. A 2023 investigation ordered by the state’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, concluded that prosecutors had withheld evidence about Sneed’s bipolar disorder—and failed to correct his false testimony about taking lithium—in violation of Glossip’s fair-trial rights.

Drummond sought to have Glossip’s conviction overturned, but the state’s highest criminal-appeals court found that the newly discovered evidence was insufficient to halt the execution.

Glossip appealed to the Supreme Court, and Drummond, who has vigorously defended death sentences in other cases, backed his claim. With the inmate and the state aligned, the justices appointed an outside attorney to present arguments supporting the conviction.

“The jury could convict Glossip only if it believed Sneed,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the majority in Tuesday’s ruling. “Had the prosecution corrected Sneed on the stand,” jurors would have learned not only that the star witness was untrustworthy, “but also that Sneed was willing to lie to them under oath,” she wrote.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the majority. Justice Amy Coney Barrett filed an opinion arguing the case should be returned to the Oklahoma courts for reconsideration.

Justice Clarence Thomas filed a furious dissent arguing that the Supreme Court lacked authority to review the case, much less set aside Glossip’s conviction. “The Court stretches the law at every turn to rule in his favor,” he wrote, joined in part by Barrett and in full by Justice Samuel Alito.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, who as an appellate judge in 2013 voted to affirm Glossip’s conviction on other grounds, recused himself from the case.

Glossip is no stranger to the Supreme Court. Were it not for his role in a separate case arguing that lethal injection is an unconstitutionally cruel method of execution, he might not have been alive to see his conviction overturned.

In 2015, a 5-4 court rejected Glossip’s arguments against lethal injection. The majority opinion, written by Alito, made it nearly impossible for condemned inmates to challenge the cruelty of execution methods without recommending a feasible alternative. In dueling separate opinions, Justices Stephen Breyer and Antonin Scalia argued over the constitutionality of the death penalty and, tellingly, the prospects for putting an innocent defendant to death.

The lethal injection litigation pushed Glossip back in the execution queue, giving an attorney time to investigate flaws in the case.

“We are thankful that a clear majority of the court supports longstanding precedent that prosecutors cannot hide critical evidence from defense lawyers and cannot stand by while their witnesses knowingly lie to the jury,” said Donald Knight, the pro bono lawyer whose yearslong investigation pushed the state to repudiate the conviction.

Knight, who was brought into the case by the death-penalty opponent Sister Helen Prejean, said he went through 26 boxes of case records, finding dozens of leads that neither police nor previous defense lawyers followed up.

With help from other volunteers, Knight logged flaws in the 10-day police investigation and tracked down new witnesses to support the theory that Sneed, either alone or with an accomplice, killed Van Treese in a robbery gone wrong. At the murder trial in Oklahoma City, prosecutors theorized that Glossip had been skimming money from the motel and wanted to take over the business.

Van Treese’s son and several of his relatives remain convinced of Glossip’s guilt.

“The family remains confident that when that new trial is held, the jury will return the same verdict as in the first two trials: guilty of first-degree murder,” said Paul Cassell, a law professor and former federal judge who represents those relatives.

Oklahoma County District Attorney Vicki Behenna, who must decide whether to retry Glossip or drop the case, said she was reviewing Tuesday’s decision and would take further steps in consultation with Drummond.