Supreme Court orders new trial for Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip

Washington — The Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered a new trial for Richard Glossip, an Oklahoma death row inmate who was joined in his bid to have his conviction thrown out by the state’s Republican attorney general.

The high court ruled 5-3 in favor of Glossip and reversed a decision of the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals that upheld his conviction and death sentence. Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered the opinion for the court and was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Neil Gorsuch did not take part in the court’s consideration of the case.

After first finding that the high court has jurisdiction to review the Oklahoma court’s decision, Sotomayor wrote that the prosecution’s failure to correct testimony of their key witness during the trial violated Glossip’s right to due process, entitling him to a new trial.

“Turning to the merits, we conclude that the prosecution violated its constitutional obligation to correct false testimony,” she wrote.

It will now be up to Oklahoma prosecutors to determine how to proceed.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed with the majority’s finding as to the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, but said she would not order the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to set aside Glossip’s conviction. Instead, she said would have sent the case back for more proceedings.

In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the Supreme Court lacks the power to override the decisions of the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals and the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board, which declined to grant Glossip clemency in 2023.

“The court’s decision distorts our jurisdiction, imagines a constitutional violation where none occurred, and abandons basic principles governing the disposition of state-court appeals,” Thomas wrote in a dissenting opinion joined by Justice Samuel Alito.

The Glossip case

Glossip was convicted in the 1997 murder of the owner of the Oklahoma City motel where he worked and was sentenced to death more than two decades ago. Since then, he has seen nine execution dates come and go, and eaten his “last meal” three times.

Glossip had also been before the Supreme Court once before, in 2015, when he unsuccessfully challenged Oklahoma’s method of execution on Eighth Amendment grounds.

In the latest challenge, his bid to toss out his conviction and grant him a new trial was backed by Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, because of errors committed during his earlier trial.

A central issue in the court fight involved the testimony of Glossip’s co-defendant, Justin Sneed, who claimed Glossip paid him $10,000 to kill Barry Van Treese, the motel owner.

Sneed admitted to robbing and bludgeoning Van Treese and is serving a sentence of life in prison. Glossip, meanwhile, has said he was not involved in the murder and repeatedly maintained his innocence over his roughly 25 years on death row.

Glossip’s first conviction was overturned because of ineffective assistance of counsel. During his second trial, Sneed told prosecutors that he had never seen a psychiatrist, but was given lithium after he was arrested. But in 2022, the state found prosecutors’ handwritten notes in a banker’s box, which Drummond said called into question Sneed’s credibility as a witness.

Lawyers for Glossip and Drummond argued the notes showed that Sneed told prosecutors he was given lithium after seeing a jailhouse psychiatrist and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. But neither his diagnosis nor his treatment by the psychiatrist were disclosed to Glossip’s defense team, which Drummond said indicated prosecutors elicited false testimony on the matter.

Following the revelations, Oklahoma’s attorney general disclosed the box’s materials to Glossip and had an independent counsel review the case. That examination, conducted by former district attorney Rex Duncan, ended in April 2023 and concluded that Glossip was deprived of a fair trial.

The state asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to toss out Glossip’s conviction and sentence, arguing that the errors committed during the trial rendered both flaws. But the court denied relief and ordered the state to move forward with executing Glossip. A request for clemency to the Oklahoma Parole and Pardon Board, which Drummond supported, was also unsuccessful after it deadlocked 2-2. 

Glossip and Drummond then urged the Supreme Court to step in. The court in May 2023 agreed to pause his execution and months later agreed to hear his case. Gorsuch did not participate in the proceedings, likely because of earlier involvement when he was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, which covers Oklahoma.

Arguments in the case took place in early October at the start of the Supreme Court’s new term. Many of the questions focused on the interpretation of prosecutors’ notes, as well as how the jury’s view of the case would have been impacted had they known Sneed was prescribed lithium by a psychiatrist after his arrest.

Writing for the majority, Sotomayor said the jury’s assessment of Sneed’s credibility was determinative.

“Had the prosecution corrected Sneed on the stand, his credibility plainly would have suffered,” she wrote. “That correction would have revealed to the jury not just that Sneed was untrustworthy … but also that Sneed was willing to lie to them under oath. Such a revelation would be significant in any case, and was especially so here where Sneed was already ‘nobody’s idea of a strong witness.'”

The court found that even though Sneed’s bipolar disorder was irrelevant, “his willingness to lie about it to the jury was not.”

But writing in dissent, Thomas accused the majority of “having bent the law at every turn to grant relief” to Glossip, and said the court had no authority to order a new trial. 

As to Sneed’s credibility, Thomas wrote that “there is no reason to think” that disclosing his bipolar disorder would have affected the outcome of the trial.

“The court stretches the law at every turn to rule in [Glossip’s] favor,” Thomas wrote. “At the threshold, it concocts federal jurisdiction by misreading the decision below. On the merits, it finds a due process violation based on patently immaterial testimony about a witness’s medical condition. And, for the remedy, it orders a new trial in violation of black-letter law on this Court’s power to review state-court judgments.”