The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to take up the extraordinary appeal of an Oklahoma death row inmate named Richard Glossip, a man who even the state attorney general said should not be executed.
Last May the justices halted the pending execution while legal challenges played out.
Glossip has endured 26 years behind bars, nine execution dates, three last meals and two independent investigations that raised serious doubts about his conviction.
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner F. Drummond told the Supreme Court that the state had recently made the “difficult decision” to confess error in Glossip’s case and support vacating the conviction of Glossip. The move was an about-face and came after review of new information that had come to light related to prosecutorial misconduct at Glossip’s trial.
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals refused however, to accept the confession of error and determined the execution should go forward.
“That decision cannot be the final word in this case,” Drummond told the justices. “The injustice of allowing a capital sentence to be caried out where the conviction was occasioned by the government’s own admitted failings would be nigh unfathomable,” Drummond told the court in court papers.
The case dates back to 1987 when Justin Sneed murdered Barry Van Treese, the owner of a motel in Oklahoma City. After his arrest, and in exchange for avoiding the death sentence, Sneed implicated Glossip, who was serving as the motel’s manager. Sneed admitted to killing Van Treese. But at trial, prosecutors portrayed the killing as a murder-for-hire plot orchestrated by Glossip. Sneed secured a deal to avoid the death penalty: Plead guilty and testify against Glossip, then a 35-year-old whose criminal record included a single traffic ticket, per his attorneys.
Glossip’s conviction, according to the…
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