EDITOR’S NOTE: This article first appeared at The Roots of Liberty May 2016, and was reposted here on Substack March 2022. The tale of Richard Glossip, a man on Oklahoma’s Death Row that, per this article at The Free Press, shouldn’t be there, or at least deserves a new trial, prompted me to bring this bit back.
I've never felt strongly either way to be honest. You bring up excellent points for sure and I appreciate it. Also, the jury nullification was quite interesting to me. I'd never heard of that before
There's a lot more going on in the Glossip case than the biased Free Press story indicates. The reason that Republicans and other state officials are siding with Glossip isn't that they think he's innocent, as the presentation of the facts (as drawn from Glossip's claims in the Free Press article) would seem to indicate.
And also not discussed in that story is that Glossip is a serial litigant, as many people sentenced to death for heinous crimes tend to be, and such serial litigants have for years conducted a guerrilla war against the death penalty. In fact, Glossip has already been to SCOTUS once, back in 2015 (Glossip v. Gross), challenging the use of the sedative midazolam (one of the drugs that is actually used in the death penalty "cocktail", which the Free Press article correctly says is used in place of "more reliable barbiturates" because the manufacturers of those barbiturates, who are located in foreign countries, wouldn't sell them for this use due to the guerrilla warfare overseas having targeted them). He lost 5-4, with the dissenting justices (Sotomayor, joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan) all being anti-death penalty Democrats.
But this case is objectively different, and it gets tied up in Glossip's serial litigant history. Unfortunately, the Free Press article doesn't really discuss it (and in fact misleads about it). So, for Peter's readers, here are the real issues and why SCOTUS took this case:
The Free Press article correctly notes that the case against Glossip depended on the testimony of Justin Sneed, the actual murderer. The Free Press story says that Glossip doesn't know why he failed to report the dead body and then lied to police about it. Well, the prosecution convincingly made the case to the jury that Glossip did so because he actually planned and then after-the-fact was involved in the murder, and then it used Sneed's testimony about Glossip's involvement in order to convict him. But....
In response to a defense question, Sneed lied on the witness stand about not having seen a psychiatrist. In fact, he not only had seen a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist had found him to be potentially violent, especially when using meth (which he was doing when he killed Van Trees). And the prosecutors had the psychiatrist's report, so they knew he was lying. But they never shared that with the defense, and they permitted Sneed's lie in testimony to stand without correcting it. So the jury had no knowledge of this potential impeachment of the prosecution's theory of the case.
SCOTUS has ruled in previous cases that, in such cases of prosecutorial misconduct, the defendant was entitled to a new trial. So the prosecutors and state officials agreed in court that Glossip was entitled to a new trial. But here comes another complication, which is why the lower courts didn't give Glossip one and why the governor hasn't commuted his death sentence.
To deal with serial litigants such as Glossip, Oklahoma passed a law entitled the "Post-Conviction Procedures Act", basically mandating that, in the case of serial death-penalty litigants such as Glossip, who have repeatedly sought post-conviction relief over a lengthy period of time, only evidence showing actual innocence would be sufficient to overturn their convictions in court or to permit their death sentences to be commuted. And one thing this prosecutorial misconduct doesn't support is a claim of actual innocence, especially since you still have Glossip's failures to report the body or tell police about it when asked (which definitely incriminate Glossip and can't be waved away with "I don't know why I did that").
Taken as a whole, SCOTUS has to answer two questions: 1) Was the prosecutorial misconduct in Glossip's conviction so serious so serious that to uphold the conviction violated due process of law, especially when the state no longer seeks to defend the conviction, and 2) Is the state law represented by the Oklahoma "post-Conviction Procedures Act" sufficient state-law grounds to uphold the judgment despite the other issues with the case? (Remember, the murder was committed -- and Glossip and Sneed were charged with it -- in January 1997, but this claim was only raised in 2022, 25 years later, as part of Glossip's fifth application for post-conviction relief. Glossip's lawyers claim they only just learned about this, despite how long ago it happened.)
How the case will come out iat SCOTUS s still an open issue, but despite the headline in the Free Press article, it is unlikely that this case "will bring down the death penalty itself". The idea that Glossip is actually innocent seems pretty far-fetched under the circumstances, even if the writer in the Free Press believes it.
I wrote all of this to impeach the linked article in the Free Press. That said, I generally agree with Peter's position: it takes more faith in human nature than I have to believe that local prosecutors in the future are not going to play as fast and loose with the rules of evidence as the ones in Glossip's murder trial did. Glossip may in fact be guilty as charged, but it might be more conducive to justice in the future to remove some of the temptation for local prosecutors to misbehave.
Thanks for this. A new trial seems the right outcome, along with a major "sunlight" reckoning of past misconduct as a warning against more of the same.
An aside, and one I posted in the NRPlus group. Of all the points against Kamala Harris, her record regarding exculpatory evidence and potentially innocent accused stands as the worst to me, and it's indicative of a system that rewards sociopathic prosecutors.
These are my thoughts exactly.
I've never felt strongly either way to be honest. You bring up excellent points for sure and I appreciate it. Also, the jury nullification was quite interesting to me. I'd never heard of that before
If you're interested, and skipped over the hyperlink, check out the Fully Informed Jury Association.
https://fija.org
There's a lot more going on in the Glossip case than the biased Free Press story indicates. The reason that Republicans and other state officials are siding with Glossip isn't that they think he's innocent, as the presentation of the facts (as drawn from Glossip's claims in the Free Press article) would seem to indicate.
And also not discussed in that story is that Glossip is a serial litigant, as many people sentenced to death for heinous crimes tend to be, and such serial litigants have for years conducted a guerrilla war against the death penalty. In fact, Glossip has already been to SCOTUS once, back in 2015 (Glossip v. Gross), challenging the use of the sedative midazolam (one of the drugs that is actually used in the death penalty "cocktail", which the Free Press article correctly says is used in place of "more reliable barbiturates" because the manufacturers of those barbiturates, who are located in foreign countries, wouldn't sell them for this use due to the guerrilla warfare overseas having targeted them). He lost 5-4, with the dissenting justices (Sotomayor, joined by Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan) all being anti-death penalty Democrats.
But this case is objectively different, and it gets tied up in Glossip's serial litigant history. Unfortunately, the Free Press article doesn't really discuss it (and in fact misleads about it). So, for Peter's readers, here are the real issues and why SCOTUS took this case:
The Free Press article correctly notes that the case against Glossip depended on the testimony of Justin Sneed, the actual murderer. The Free Press story says that Glossip doesn't know why he failed to report the dead body and then lied to police about it. Well, the prosecution convincingly made the case to the jury that Glossip did so because he actually planned and then after-the-fact was involved in the murder, and then it used Sneed's testimony about Glossip's involvement in order to convict him. But....
In response to a defense question, Sneed lied on the witness stand about not having seen a psychiatrist. In fact, he not only had seen a psychiatrist, the psychiatrist had found him to be potentially violent, especially when using meth (which he was doing when he killed Van Trees). And the prosecutors had the psychiatrist's report, so they knew he was lying. But they never shared that with the defense, and they permitted Sneed's lie in testimony to stand without correcting it. So the jury had no knowledge of this potential impeachment of the prosecution's theory of the case.
SCOTUS has ruled in previous cases that, in such cases of prosecutorial misconduct, the defendant was entitled to a new trial. So the prosecutors and state officials agreed in court that Glossip was entitled to a new trial. But here comes another complication, which is why the lower courts didn't give Glossip one and why the governor hasn't commuted his death sentence.
To deal with serial litigants such as Glossip, Oklahoma passed a law entitled the "Post-Conviction Procedures Act", basically mandating that, in the case of serial death-penalty litigants such as Glossip, who have repeatedly sought post-conviction relief over a lengthy period of time, only evidence showing actual innocence would be sufficient to overturn their convictions in court or to permit their death sentences to be commuted. And one thing this prosecutorial misconduct doesn't support is a claim of actual innocence, especially since you still have Glossip's failures to report the body or tell police about it when asked (which definitely incriminate Glossip and can't be waved away with "I don't know why I did that").
Taken as a whole, SCOTUS has to answer two questions: 1) Was the prosecutorial misconduct in Glossip's conviction so serious so serious that to uphold the conviction violated due process of law, especially when the state no longer seeks to defend the conviction, and 2) Is the state law represented by the Oklahoma "post-Conviction Procedures Act" sufficient state-law grounds to uphold the judgment despite the other issues with the case? (Remember, the murder was committed -- and Glossip and Sneed were charged with it -- in January 1997, but this claim was only raised in 2022, 25 years later, as part of Glossip's fifth application for post-conviction relief. Glossip's lawyers claim they only just learned about this, despite how long ago it happened.)
How the case will come out iat SCOTUS s still an open issue, but despite the headline in the Free Press article, it is unlikely that this case "will bring down the death penalty itself". The idea that Glossip is actually innocent seems pretty far-fetched under the circumstances, even if the writer in the Free Press believes it.
I wrote all of this to impeach the linked article in the Free Press. That said, I generally agree with Peter's position: it takes more faith in human nature than I have to believe that local prosecutors in the future are not going to play as fast and loose with the rules of evidence as the ones in Glossip's murder trial did. Glossip may in fact be guilty as charged, but it might be more conducive to justice in the future to remove some of the temptation for local prosecutors to misbehave.
Thanks for this. A new trial seems the right outcome, along with a major "sunlight" reckoning of past misconduct as a warning against more of the same.
An aside, and one I posted in the NRPlus group. Of all the points against Kamala Harris, her record regarding exculpatory evidence and potentially innocent accused stands as the worst to me, and it's indicative of a system that rewards sociopathic prosecutors.