The Supreme Court is asked to decide not whether the 61-year-old Glossip – for whose sake personalities such as actors Susan Sarandon and Mark Ruffalo or billionaire Richard Branson – have been mobilized is innocent, but whether his right to a fair trial was respected.
In 2015, Pope Francis wrote to the governor of the conservative state of Oklahoma, Mary Fallin, asking her to postpone Glossip’s then-imminent execution.
Nine times an execution date has been set for Glossip, three of which were postponed after he had already taken “his last meal”.
He was convicted in 2004 of hiring someone in 1997 to kill Barry Van Treese, the owner of the motel where he worked as a manager. He was sentenced to death.
According to court documents, Van Treese accused Glossip of mismanaging the business and suspected him of embezzling money.
Glossip was convicted based on the controversial testimony of then-19-year-old meth addict Justin Snead, a motel worker. He confessed to murdering Van Treese with a baseball bat, but was spared the death penalty because he pleaded guilty to the murder and pointed Glossip to the authorities.
In prison, Snead was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with lithium. But during his testimony at Glossip’s trial he lied about his mental problems and claimed he had never sought psychiatric help. The prosecutor did not refute him.
As a result, Oklahoma Attorney General Gethner Drummond concluded that Glossip’s conviction no longer stands and, along with his attorneys, asked a state appeals court to vacate the conviction and order a new trial.
The appeals court unanimously rejected that appeal in April 2023. Then the attorney general and Glossip’s lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court, which asked for a stay of execution in May and then agreed to hear the case.
The nine Supreme Court justices will have to decide whether the prosecutors who handled the case violated the defendant’s fundamental rights, which will lead to overturning his conviction and a new trial.
“Since Snead’s credibility was probably decisive in (the court’s) finding of Glossip’s guilt or innocence, the prosecution’s withholding of information that could impeach his testimony (…) deprived Glossip the right to a fair trial”, his lawyers emphasize in their appeal to the Supreme Court.
Attorney General Drummond, for his part, criticizes the decision of the Oklahoma Court of Appeals.
“Since the prosecution makes the extraordinary decision to admit a mistake in a criminal case, the courts have an obligation to take that admission seriously,” “especially in cases involving the finality of sentences,” he says.
With no legal representation to defend Glossip’s conviction, the Supreme Court appointed attorney Christopher Michael, who works in the office of Superior Court Judge John Roberts, to argue.
It’s an uncommon practice that David Cole, legal director of the civil rights group ACLU, denounced.
“It is a special case in which both the prosecution and the defense believe that this man should not be executed. And yet they have to reach the Supreme Court”, he commented.
For his part, Christopher Michael assures that the evidence for Glossip’s guilt is “convincing” and that the US Supreme Court is not competent to annul the final decision of the Oklahoma court.
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