Will the Supreme Court Save Richard Glossip?

The Supreme Court—often derided by progressives as a bastion of far-right extremists—will soon deal a devastating blow to the death penalty. 

The court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the case of Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip on Wednesday, and either way they rule, their decision will rock national attitudes toward capital punishment.

If the court rules in favor of Glossip, it will be acknowledging that a grave injustice has taken place, raising questions over the guilt of anyone on death row. But if the court decides against him, and Oklahoma moves forward with his execution—even though almost every powerful Republican in the state opposes it—the call to end capital punishment in the state will only grow.

“No matter which side of the Glossip case the Supreme Court ultimately agrees with, state leaders will be forced to answer why Oklahoma has insisted on executing a man without considering new and potentially exculpatory evidence,” Brett Farley, the executive director of Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, which opposes the death penalty, told The Free Press. “It’s simply indefensible.”

In January, I reported on Glossip’s 1998 murder conviction, and his long, harrowing journey on Oklahoma’s death row.

Glossip was convicted of the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese, the owner of an Oklahoma City motel where Glossip worked as a manager. The guilty verdict rested entirely on testimony from Justin Sneed—a meth addict with a violent criminal record who worked at the motel as a maintenance man. In exchange for a lighter sentence, Sneed fingered Glossip for the crime. And though there was no forensic evidence connecting Glossip to the murder, and Sneed even wrote a letter to his own defense lawyer confessing his regret over the case in 2007, a death sentence still hangs over Glossip.

Gentner Drummond—the state’s Republican, pro–death penalty attorney general—told me: “I don’t believe that justice is served by executing a man based on the testimony of a compromised witness.” 

Kevin McDugle, a pro–death penalty Republican in Oklahoma’s state legislature, told me: “If Glossip is executed, I will fight the state to end the death penalty, and you’ll see the state of Oklahoma go through some extreme changes on their views.” 

Oklahoma is second only to Texas in the number of executions it has carried out since the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that capital punishment was constitutional—and, in fact, it is number 1 when it comes to per capita executions.

Glossip, who has spent the past two decades in solitary confinement, has been scheduled to die nine times, and has had three last meals. In 2014, after Oklahoma botched another man’s execution, a growing number of prominent Republicans, including the state attorney general and the state’s Republican governor, began campaigning for Glossip’s exoneration. 

But in Oklahoma, the governor can commute a death sentence only if the state’s Pardon and Parole Board gives the okay—and the board has refused to do that. 

Executing Glossip, 61, who has spent more than a quarter-century in prison for a crime that almost no one in either political party now believes he committed, would amount to a “travesty of justice,” said Drummond, the state’s top prosecutor. Earlier this year, Drummond filed a brief to the Supreme Court in which he noted that new evidence showed Sneed lied on the stand and that prosecutors, who were aware of as much, did nothing to correct the record.

“It’s probably the only time that I know where the state’s top law enforcement officer, our attorney general, has sided with the defendant and said that he needs a new trial because of gross negligence from the past,” McDugle told me.

He added that “the Supreme Court does not take cases like this, so this is huge.”

Arguing on Glossip’s behalf Wednesday will be a duo of former U.S. solicitors general: Paul Clement, who was nominated by President George W. Bush; and Seth Waxman, appointed by President Bill Clinton.

If they prevail, Glossip will get a new trial that will almost certainly lead to his acquittal and could prove deeply embarrassing to prosecutors and the District Attorneys Council, which represents Oklahoma’s twenty-seven elected district attorneys. It will likely take months for the Supreme Court to issue its opinion.

When I spoke with Glossip late last year, he told me that he had grown accustomed to the long, tedious stretches of time on death row punctuated by the occasional execution date.

In September 2015, he came within hours of execution.

He recalled being in his cell, immediately adjacent to the room where they planned to execute him, and hearing other prisoners kicking their cell doors. “It’s a send-off—letting them know that people are thinking of them,” Glossip told me.

At the last minute, the governor granted Glossip a stay after it was discovered that the state didn’t have the right cocktail of drugs to kill him. Now, every day, he lives for the moment that he will be free and home with his wife, Lea.

“I know that day is coming soon,” he told me, “where her and I will be standing out there in the sun and enjoying and breathing the air.”

Rupa Subramanya is a reporter for The Free Press. Read her article “Is Justice Still Blind in Canada?” and follow her on X, formerly Twitter, @rupasubramanya.

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