Richard Glossip granted new trial

Richard Glossip, on death row in Oklahoma since 1997 for his alleged role in the murder of a motel owner, should get a new trial according to a ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States on Feb. 25. Led by Justice Sonia Sotomayer, the court’s majority determined that prosecutors failed in their obligation to correct false testimony and that a jury might not have sentenced Glossip to death had the false testimony been corrected.

After his initial trial, Glossip was convicted again in 2004 and faced nine execution dates and three last meals. The court’s ruling puts Glossip’s case back in the hands of Oklahoma District Attorney Vicki Behenna.

In 1997, Glossip worked as a live-in manager at the Best Budget Inn outside Oklahoma City when the owner Barry Van Treese was bludgeoned to death. No physical evidence linked Glossip to the murder, but Justin Sneed, a 19-year-old motel maintenance worker who admitted to the crime, insisted it was Glossip’s idea and that Glossip paid him to do it.

In exchange for testifying against Glossip, Sneed was sentenced to life without parole, while Glossip was given the death penalty. Sneed was also the state’s key witness at Glossip’s second trial.

While in jail, Sneed was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was prescribed lithium to manage it. Yet when he testified against Glossip he denied ever seeing a psychiatrist and claimed he wasn’t aware of why he’d been prescribed lithium.

In 2022, Glossip’s attorneys were given boxes of evidence by the state that contained previously undisclosed documents exposing Sneed’s lie. The records included notes from a meeting between Sneed and prosecutor Connie Smothermon before the 2004 trial in which she wrote the name of the Oklahoma City Jail psychiatrist who examined Sneed and prescribed lithium. The documents revealed that the prosecutor was fully aware of Sneed’s mental condition but failed to correct his testimony at trial, letting the jury convict Glossip based on Sneed’s lies.

In 2023, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to vacate Glossip’s conviction based on these disclosures of prosecutorial misconduct in their failure to provide defense attorneys with this information. Drummond wrote, “With this information plus Sneed’s history of drug addiction, the state believes that a qualified defense attorney likely would have attacked Sneed’s ability to properly recall key facts.”

The SCOTUS majority agreed, noting that the entire case against Glossip rested on Sneed’s testimony. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “Because Sneed’s testimony was the only direct evidence of Glossip’s guilt of capital murder, the jury’s assessment of Sneed’s credibility was necessarily determinative here. … Besides Sneed, no other witness and physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese’s murder. Thus, the jury could convict Glossip only if it believed Sneed.”

Glossip’s case will be sent back to Oklahoma City where District Attorney Behenna will decide whether he should be retried or walk out of prison a free person.

Significance for other cases

News of Glossip’s SCOTUS verdict was welcomed by the movements to free other prisoners whose convictions also resulted from prosecutorial misconduct, including Mumia Abu-Jamal’s case and Jerome Coffey’s — both under appeals in Pennsylvania. A consideration is that laws governing post-conviction procedures vary from state to state, and Oklahoma has the kind of pure state law ground that limits SCOTUS’ jurisdiction.

However, Pennsylvania law is more extensive, and there could be more rights for incarcerated people. The Glossip decision will have ramifications for Pennsylvania to set better standards, for example for rulings made by judges in the Philadelphia Common Pleas Court. In 2023, Judge Lucretia Clemmons denied Mumia’s request for an evidentiary hearing because she concluded the “evidence of police and prosecutorial misconduct was too old” or “might not have changed the jury’s vote.”

Yet, Sotomayor noted that under the Supreme Court’s 1959 ruling in Napue v. Illinois, the highest court had the power to review the state court’s ruling rejecting Drummond’s evidence that the prosecutors’ failure to correct Sneed’s false testimony violated the Napue decision.

Sotomayor explained that under the Napue ruling: “Prosecutors violate the Constitution when they knowingly obtain a conviction using false evidence — either by soliciting false testimony or allowing false testimony to stand without correcting it. When that happens, the defendant is entitled to a new trial if there is a reasonable chance that the false testimony could have affected the jury’s decision.”