By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court threw out Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip’s conviction for a 1997 murder-for-hire plot and granted him a new trial, concluding on Tuesday that prosecutors violated their constitutional duty to correct false testimony by their star witness.
The justices, in a 5-3 ruling authored by liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reversed a lower court’s decision that had upheld Glossip’s conviction and had allowed his planned execution to move forward despite his claim that prosecutors wrongly withheld evidence that could help his defense.
Don Knight, an attorney for Glossip, called the ruling “a victory for justice and fairness in our judicial system.”
“We are thankful that a clear majority of the court supports long-standing precedent that prosecutors cannot hide critical evidence from defense lawyers and cannot stand by while their witnesses knowingly lie to the jury,” Knight said.
“Rich Glossip, who has maintained his innocence for 27 years, will now be given the chance to have the fair trial that he has always been denied,” Knight added.
During Oct. 9 arguments in the case, the justices probed whether an Oklahoma court properly weighed newly revealed information that Glossip’s lawyers said would have aided his defense and which the state’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, called wrongly withheld by prosecutors. Drummond, a Republican, supported Glossip’s appeal.
Glossip’s lawyers had asked the justices to throw out his conviction and grant him a new trial after the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals upheld his death sentence despite potentially exculpatory evidence being found in an independent investigation ordered by Drummond.
Drummond said on Tuesday that in deciding how to proceed in the case his office will “determine the most appropriate course of action to ensure justice is secured for all involved.”
Glossip, now 62, was convicted of commissioning the murder of Barry Van Treese, owner of the Best Budget Inn motel in Oklahoma City where Glossip was a manager.
All parties agree Van Treese was fatally beaten with a baseball bat by maintenance worker Justin Sneed, who eventually became the star witness for the prosecution. Sneed, who was a methamphetamine addict, confessed to the murder but avoided capital punishment by accepting a plea deal that involved testifying that Glossip paid him $10,000 to do it.
Glossip admitted to helping Sneed cover up the murder after it occurred, but denied knowing Sneed planned to kill Van Treese or encouraging him to do so.
The evidence disclosed in 2023 by Drummond – including a prosecutor’s hand-written notes from a meeting with Sneed – cast doubt on Sneed’s credibility, according to Glossip’s lawyers. They said they were kept in the dark about Sneed receiving psychiatric treatment for bipolar disorder immediately after his arrest, and that prosecutors failed to correct Sneed’s false statement about his prescription for the medication lithium.
‘FAILURE TO CORRECT’
Sotomayor was joined in the decision by the court’s two other liberal members as well as by conservative Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh. Sotomayor emphasized that Sneed’s testimony had been indispensable to prosecutors, noting that “no other witness and no physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese’s murder.”
“Thus, the jury could convict Glossip only if it believed Sneed,” Sotomayor wrote.
Sotomayor cited the court’s 1959 decision in a case called Napue v. Illinois, which held that a conviction secured through the knowing use of false evidence violates the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment provision protecting the right to due process.
“We conclude that the prosecution’s failure to correct Sneed’s trial testimony violated the Due Process Clause,” Sotomayor wrote.
Justice Clarence Thomas, in a 44-page dissent joined by fellow conservative Justice Samuel Alito, accused the court’s majority of stretching the law at every turn to rule in Glossip’s favor. Thomas called Sneed’s testimony about his medical condition “patently immaterial.”
Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in a partial dissent, said the court was wrong to set aside Glossip’s conviction and instead should have returned the case to a lower court for further proceedings.
Drummond became an unlikely ally of Glossip in the case. Although Drummond has previously said he believes Glossip’s role in covering up Van Treese’s murder made him at least an “accessory after the fact,” justifying a long prison sentence, his murder conviction was too flawed to defend.
“I have long maintained that I do not believe Mr. Glossip is innocent, but it is now an undeniable fact that he did not receive a fair trial,” Drummond said after Tuesday’s ruling.
Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in the case, apparently because he dealt with the matter while earlier serving on a lower court. The Supreme Court in 2023 halted Glossip’s scheduled execution while his appeal proceeded.
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)
