Supreme Court to decide if Oklahoma must execute Richard Glossip – SCOTUSblog

Twice prior to now decade the Supreme Court docket has blocked Oklahoma from executing Richard Glossip. Now the state has joined Glossip to argue that newly uncovered proof reveals prosecutors violated his rights at trial. However even with the Oklahoma’s uncommon confession of error, each the state’s highest court docket for legal circumstances and the state’s pardon and parole board turned down Glossip’s pleas for aid. On Oct. 9, two former U.S. solicitors common – Seth Waxman, representing Glossip, and Paul Clement, representing Oklahoma’s legal professional common – will seem earlier than the justices, looking for to influence them to put aside Glossip’s conviction and dying sentence and order a brand new trial.

Oklahoma Lawyer Basic Gentner Drummond informed the court docket that the state shouldn’t be on the lookout for an exoneration “by fiat (or in any respect)” however that “justice wouldn’t be served by transferring ahead with a capital sentence that the State can now not defend.”

In 1997, Barry Van Treese was bludgeoned to dying with a baseball bat within the room he was staying in at his Oklahoma Metropolis motel, the place Glossip labored as a supervisor. One other one in every of Van Treese’s workers, Justin Sneed, confessed to killing him whereas on meth. He’s serving a life sentence. Glossip has maintained he had no half within the homicide and is harmless over the a long time he has been on dying row.

The one proof implicating Glossip in Van Treese’s dying was testimony from Sneed, who labored as a handyman on the lodge. Sneed informed jurors that Glossip paid him as much as $10,000 to kill Van Treese. In trade for his testimony, prosecutors promised Sneed that he wouldn’t face the dying penalty.  

In 2015, the Supreme Court docket put Glossip’s execution (in addition to these of two different males) on maintain whereas it thought-about their problem to the state’s deadly injection protocol. However by a vote of 5-4, the justices rejected that problem.

In June 2022, a legislation agency employed by Oklahoma legislators issued a 259-page report wherein it discovered “grave doubt as to the integrity of Glossip’s homicide conviction and dying sentence.” The agency pointed to (amongst different issues) prosecutors’ “deliberate” destruction of “key bodily proof” and the “poor and curtailed police investigation.”

Glossip requested an Oklahoma court docket to put aside his conviction and sentence final 12 months. In January 2023, he stated, he had acquired for the primary time recordsdata from the state indicating that prosecutors knew, however had not disclosed to Glossip or his attorneys, that Sneed had been prescribed lithium for bipolar dysfunction after his arrest. Sneed had stated that he was by accident prescribed the drug for a chilly. Prosecutors additionally allowed Sneed to testify falsely that he had by no means been handled by a psychiatrist.

Throughout the identical month, Drummond appointed a former district legal professional and Republican legislator, Rex Duncan, as an unbiased counsel to evaluation Glossip’s case. In April 2023, after 600 hours of labor, Duncan reported that he believed a brand new trial was needed as a result of Glossip had been disadvantaged of a good trial.

Primarily based on that report, Drummond joined Glossip’s request for the Oklahoma Court docket of Legal Appeals, the state’s highest court docket for legal circumstances, to put aside his conviction, in addition to his plea for clemency from the state’s Pardon and Parole Board.

Each of these efforts to hunt aid in Oklahoma had been denied, prompting Glossip (once more, with Drummond’s help) to go to the Supreme Court docket, asking the justices to place his execution, scheduled for Might 18, 2023, on maintain to provide them extra time to contemplate his appeals.

The justices granted that request, and in January 2024 they agreed to take up Glossip’s case. With the state siding with Glossip, a couple of weeks later the Supreme Court docket appointed Christopher Michel, a former clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts, to defend the choice by the Oklahoma Court docket of Legal Appeals leaving Glossip’s conviction and dying sentence in place.

In granting the case, the justices added a query for the events to deal with: Whether or not the Supreme Court docket has the facility to evaluation the choice by the Oklahoma Court docket of Legal Appeals in any respect, or whether or not it’s as an alternative barred from doing so as a result of the choice rests on an “enough and unbiased state floor.” The Van Treese household, who imagine Glossip must be executed, help this idea that the case is exterior the court docket’s jurisdiction.

Michel contends that the Supreme Court docket can not think about Glossip’s claims as a result of the state court docket resolved them on a “paradigmatic” enough and unbiased state floor: It held that Glossip’s claims had been barred by a state legislation that prohibits courts in capital circumstances from reviewing points {that a} prisoner may have raised earlier. In doing so, he writes, the state court docket utilized that legislation “basically verbatim” in its opinion, with out referring to federal legislation.

Glossip counters that there’s a “excessive hurdle” to beat the presumption that the Supreme Court docket can evaluation a state court docket ruling on a problem of federal legislation. And on this case, he stresses, the state court docket’s determination “relied instantly” on federal legislation – particularly, the Supreme Court docket’s 1963 determination in Brady v. Maryland, which requires prosecutors to show over any proof that’s favorable to the defendant and will have an effect on the choice about guilt or punishment, and its 1959 determination in Napue v. Illinois, holding that if prosecutors receive a conviction utilizing what they know is fake testimony, the conviction have to be put aside if there’s “any cheap probability” that the false testimony may have affected the jury’s determination. The state court docket dominated on the substance of Glossip’s claims associated to these circumstances, he notes, with out ever indicating that it was discussing the Supreme Court docket selections just for “steering”

Drummond provides that the state court docket’s ruling couldn’t have rested on an “enough and unbiased state floor” for one more purpose. Because the legal professional common, he explains, he can waive the applying of the state legislation on which the Oklahoma Court docket of Legal Appeals relied to make sure that justice is completed. He did so on this case, he writes, however the state court docket rejected it – so far as the state is conscious, “for the primary time ever.” That form of “unprecedented and unexplained barrier to aid,” Drummond suggests, “is exactly the form of ‘novel and unfounded’ rule that’s insufficient to” bar the Supreme Court docket from reviewing Glossip’s case.

However Michel disputes whether or not Drummond had particularly waived the applying of the state procedural legislation to Glossip on this continuing: His predecessor, Michel notes, did so in an earlier continuing however just for that continuing. So even when Drummond integrated the arguments made by his predecessor in earlier filings, that may not represent a waiver for functions of this case.

Glossip and Drummond’s arguments, Michel writes, boils all the way down to an argument “that the OCCA ought to have defined its holding extra completely or that its holding is flawed. However neither of these positions is a sound foundation for this Court docket to evaluation a state-court determination grounded in state legislation.”

The second query earlier than the court docket goes to the center of the case: Whether or not the justices ought to invalidate Glossip’s conviction and sentence as a result of prosecutors didn’t right false testimony by Sneed and switch over proof which may have helped to clear Glossip.

Glossip contends that as a result of the prosecution’s “whole case hinged on Sneed’s credibility,” its failure to right his false testimony that he had by no means seen a psychiatrist, and that he didn’t know why he had been prescribed lithium after his arrest (when he had an untreated however critical psychological well being dysfunction) was “essential.” For instance, Glossip posits, correcting Sneed’s testimony doubtless would have undermined his reliability as a witness, significantly when that testimony was the one proof that instantly linked Glossip to Van Treese’s dying.

Drummond pushes again in opposition to the state court docket’s suggestion that Sneed’s testimony was “not clearly false” as a result of he might have been “in denial of his psychological well being problems.” However “being in denial,” Drummond emphasizes, shouldn’t be an excuse for mendacity. And in any occasion, Drummond writes, no matter what Sneed might have believed, Napue’s bar on eliciting false testimony applies to prosecutors, not witnesses.

Equally, Glossip continues, if prosecutors had disclosed that Sneed had been handled by a psychiatrist and had been prescribed lithium, Glossip’s protection attorneys may have investigated Sneed’s psychological well being points, highlighted his lies on the stand, and steered that his reminiscence of the crime was “extremely unreliable.” That in flip may have prompted the jury to be skeptical of Sneed’s testimony, Glossip argues.

Michel counters that Glossip’s claims for aid hinge on a “vital overreading” of the prosecutor’s notes. The notes to which Glossip factors are so “cryptic” – containing solely the phrase “on Lithium?” and a reference to a health care provider – that they don’t truly battle with Sneed’s testimony or assist Glossip, he says. However even when Glossip and the state are proper that having this info would have indicated to Glossip’s trial attorneys that Sneed had been prescribed lithium by a psychiatrist, he suggests, it’s unlikely to have mattered whether or not the jury had that extra info, slightly than merely realizing (as they did) {that a} health-care supplier had prescribed lithium for Sneed.

Lastly, Drummond faults the state court docket for failing to provide any weight to his conclusion that Glossip’s conviction and dying sentence must be put aside as a result of it’s “constitutionally unsupportable.” That call, he tells the justices, “sends a horrible sign to litigants by suggesting that the courts have a vested curiosity in preserving their ‘personal’ convictions.”

“Nothing within the Structure compels a state court docket to supply a selected measure of deference to a state official’s confession of error,” Michel observes. However even when courts had been required to provide such confessions “respectful consideration,” he provides, the state court docket glad that obligation “by acknowledging the Lawyer Basic’s place however disagreeing with it on the legislation and information.” Furthermore, he contends, a request like Drummond’s for courts to intervene and invalidate legal convictions creates “critical” considerations in regards to the division of energy between the three branches of presidency.

Justice Neil Gorsuch has recused himself from the proceedings in Glossip’s case to date, presumably as a result of he participated in one in every of Glossip’s earlier appeals when he served as a decide on the U.S. Court docket of Appeals for the tenth Circuit, which incorporates Oklahoma.

This text was initially printed at Howe on the Court docket.