An independent counsel has been appointed to review the murder conviction and death sentence of Richard Glossip, a death row inmate who has maintained his innocence in a 1997 murder-for-hire, after a growing body of evidence sparked calls for reassessment.
Oklahoma attorney general Gentner Drummond on Thursday stated that a comprehensive review of Glossip’s conviction will be carried out by district attorney Rex Duncan, including the initial investigation by Oklahoma City police, two separate trials, sentencing, and appeals.
The decision comes after a growing innocence movement around Glossip’s case as emerging evidence suggested the initial conviction was based on shaky grounds.
“Circumstances surrounding this case necessitate a thorough review,” Mr Drummond said in a statement.
“While I am confident in our judicial system, that does not allow me to ignore evidence. This review helps ensure that justice is served, both to the (victim’s) family and the accused.”
Glossip, 59, was convicted of ordering the 1997 murder of his boss at an Oklahoma City motel and has been in criminal justice limbo ever since. He has escaped the execution chamber three times, including once due to an accidental mix-up by authorities with the lethal drug just hours before his sentence was set to be carried out.
Glossip has long maintained his innocence in the case.
However, a push to prove his innocence grew last year when a Houston law firm that investigated his conviction after state lawmakers requested it discovered a slew of new information, raising serious concerns about whether Oklahoma was about to execute an innocent man.
The firm’s 30 attorneys working through 12,000 documents, reported there was some lost or destroyed evidence in the case and that a detective, biased against Glossip, improperly asked leading questions to a co-defendant Justin Sneed to implicate Glossip in the killing.
“Our conclusion is that no reasonable juror, hearing the complete record, and the uncovered facts ... would have convicted Richard Glossip of capital murder,” Stan Perry, an attorney for Houston-based Reed Smith who led the firm’s investigation, said after the report was released last year.
On 7 January 1997, 19-year-old maintenance man Justin Sneed beat his boss, 54-year-old motel owner Barry Van Treese, to death with a baseball bat. Oklahoma police arrested the teenager, who had a history of drug addiction, violence, and past criminal offences, soon after, and he admitted to robbing Treese.
However, his statement at the time said he did so only after Glossip promised to pay him $10,000. A jury decided to sentence Sneed to life in prison and he was a key witness against Glossip at both of his trials.
Glossip, 33 at the time, who lived and worked at the hotel as manager and had no significant criminal history, was believed to be the mastermind of the killing and was convicted later for murder-for-hire.
“The thing that didn’t make any sense right off the bat is Richard Glossip had all the money, he always had all the money. It was a cash kind of business. He would hold money until Van Treese came to pick it up,” Don Knight, Glossip’s current attorney, told The Independent last year.
“That never made any sense to me. You could have twice as much and you didn’t have to kill anybody to get it. You could just walk off. That was absolutely insane to me.”
Glossip is scheduled to be executed on 18 May, but the review has come as a ray of hope for the lawyers.
“The new evidence we have uncovered since 2015 shows conclusively, as the first independent investigation by Reed Smith found, that no reasonable juror who viewed all the evidence would find Mr Glossip guilty of murder for hire,” Mr Knight said in a statement.
“We are confident that this new investigation will reach the same conclusion.”
