Last year, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond did something prosecutors rarely do: He admitted a prosecutor’s office was wrong. Faced with abundant evidence that Oklahoma had sentenced Richard Glossip to death without giving him a fair trial, Drummond’s office supported Glossip’s efforts to stop the execution.
Glossip was convicted of the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese, owner of the Oklahoma City motel where Glossip worked as a manager. It was the motel’s handyman, Justin Sneed, who bludgeoned Van Treese to death with a baseball bat. But as part of a plea deal to avoid the death penalty, Sneed testified that Glossip hired him to commit the murder. As a result, Sneed was sentenced to life in prison. Glossip was sentenced to death.
In response to public outcry, state legislators later hired attorneys to conduct an independent investigation, and the state attorney general’s office separately hired an independent counsel to review Glossip’s case. Both investigations revealed a litany of errors at trial, including material misstatements by Sneed and suppression of evidence by the district attorney’s office. Sneed said he had never seen a psychiatrist, but at the time of the murder, he was actively taking a medication prescribed by a psychiatrist that, when combined with his drug use, is known to make people volatile.
The investigators found that if the jury had known those facts—and if they knew Sneed had lied under oath about them—the jurors might have taken Sneed’s testimony pinning the murder on Glossip with a grain of salt. The prosecutor also concealed that police pushed Sneed into implicating Glossip, and that Sneed later called his testimony a “mistake” that he wanted to “recant.”
Because of these revelations, the Oklahoma attorney general’s office said that on appeal, it was “not comfortable” arguing that the result of the trial would have been the same even without the errors. “The State has reached the difficult conclusion that justice requires setting aside Glossip’s conviction,” Drummond wrote in a 2023 court filing.
The Innocence Project has characterized admissions like this one—“confessions of error,” in legal terms—as “extraordinary events.” Between 1908 and 2022, the state confessed error in just 298 cases in Oklahoma’s criminal appeals court, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers—on average, just a handful each year. But then something even rarer happened. In all but two of those 298 cases—99.3 percent—the court agreed with the state and granted the defendant relief. This time, however, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals denied the motion, concluding that the attorney general’s confession of error was “not based in or law of fact.” The court concluded that Glossip didn’t provide enough new information to warrant setting aside the verdict, and was unmoved by the fact that Oklahoma doesn’t want to kill him anymore.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Glossip v. Oklahoma on October 9, but don’t let the “versus” fool you: Both Glossip and Oklahoma asking the justices to let Glossip live. “Absent this Court’s intervention, an execution will move forward under circumstances where the Attorney General has already confessed error—a result that would be unthinkable,” Drummond wrote in a court filing. Since Oklahoma and Glossip are in agreement, the Supreme Court brought in a third party to defend the criminal appeals court’s judgment. The court-appointed amicus’s argument is that the Supreme Court doesn’t have the jurisdiction, and that state courts don’t have to defer to prosecutors who later admit they got it wrong. Under the Constitution, basic fairness is admired, but not required.
All the relevant parties here want Richard Glossip to live. It would cost the Court nothing to grant their wish. Instead, the Court is entertaining the idea that it can force the state to execute someone against its wishes. The death penalty is a moral stain on the nation, and the judiciary only worsens the blot.
