Today the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of death row inmate Richard Glossip. By a 5-3 majority, the Court found that the prosecutors in the case "knowingly" failed to correct false testimony from an important state witness at Glossip's murder trial. But in reaching this conclusion, the majority refused to consider highly relevant evidence that I presented for the victim's family disproving this finding. The majority concluded that my evidence constituted "extra-record materials not properly before the Court." But as Justice Thomas pointed out in his powerful dissenting opinion, the parties in the case (Glossip and the Oklahoma Attorney General's Office) "collusively excluded this highly relevant evidence" from the record. The parties' dubious maneuver raises serious questions about the justice of today's ruling—and about our nation's treatment of crime victims' families.
VC readers will recall that I blogged about this case earlier, explaining the story behind how death row inmate Glossip concocted a phantom "Brady violation" and got Supreme Court review. See Part I, Part II, and Part III.) To quickly summarize, Glossip was convicted of the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese in 1998. After a reversal for ineffective assistance of counsel, Glossip was convicted again in 2004. The main state witness was Justin Sneed, who confessed that he (Sneed) had murdered Van Treese after Glossip had commissioned the murder.
In 2007, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ("OCCA") affirmed Glossip's conviction and sentence, rejecting Glossip's claim that the evidence proved only that he was an accessory-after-the-fact. In the years since, courts have rejected multiple challenges by Glossip to his conviction and death sentence.
