Court rejects AG's request to overturn Glossip's murder conviction; execution date set

Death row inmate Richard Glossip has lost another challenge to his murder conviction even though Oklahoma's new attorney general agreed it should be overturned.

The Oklahoma Court of Appeals on Thursday concluded 5-0 that Glossip is not entitled to relief.

Judges also refused to delay his execution any further.

"The Attorney General's 'concession' does not directly provide statutory or legal grounds for relief in this case," Judge David Lewis wrote in the 23-page opinion. "This Court's review, moreover, is limited by the legislatively enacted Post-Conviction Procedure Act."

That act and the court's own time limits "preserve the legal principle of finality of judgment," he wrote.

Glossip is now set to be put to death by lethal injection on May 18 at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester for the 1997 murder of his boss.

The unanimous ruling was a stunning setback to Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who took office in January. He said he respected it but is not giving up.

"I am not willing to allow an execution to proceed despite so many doubts," Drummond said. "Ensuring the integrity of the death penalty demands complete certainty."

Glossip's attorney, Don Knight, called the ruling manifestly unjust and said the U.S. Supreme Court will be asked to review it.

"We ask all Oklahomans who believe in justice to stand with Mr. Glossip, and the State of Oklahoma, to stop this wrongful judicial execution," he said.

Glossip, 60, has always maintained in the murder-for-hire case that he is innocent. His attorneys in March raised a new challenge to his conviction and asked for a stay of his execution.

Drummond at that time asked the court to reset the execution to August 2024.

Then, on April 6, the AG asked the court to set aside the conviction and send the case back to the Oklahoma County courthouse.

He told judges that would be a fair and just result because the key witness, confessed killer Justin Sneed, gave "false testimony" to the jury at a 2004 retrial regarding his psychiatric treatment.

The court in its opinion Thursday rejected that conclusion.

"His testimony was not clearly false," Lewis wrote. "Sneed was more than likely in denial of his mental health disorders, but counsel did not inquire further."

The defense attorney likely did not question Sneed further about it "due to the danger of showing that he was mentally vulnerable to Glossip's manipulation and control," Lewis wrote.

More: First prison wife of death row inmate Richard Glossip says he 'used me for financial gain'

The attorney general has never said Glossip is innocent.

"The State continues to believe that Glossip has culpability in the murder of Barry Van Treese," he told the appeals court April 6.

Glossip's attorneys made their latest challenge after getting full access to prosecutors' notes from the case.

More: Richard Glossip, six other Oklahoma death row inmates get new execution dates

Glossip's innocence claim has found support

Glossip has become the state's most high-profile death row inmate because of the wide support for his innocence claim. Among his supporters are conservative Republican legislators.

He also is high profile because his 2015 execution was called off when a doctor realized the wrong heart-stopping drug had been delivered.

The attorney general on Jan. 26 announced that he had hired a former district attorney to look into Glossip's innocence claim. Drummond said on April 6 the independent counsel "concluded that Glossip's conviction and sentence should be set aside."

Glossip claimed innocence in the murder of Barry Van Treese

Glossip claims he was framed for the murder of Van Treese, an Oklahoma City motel owner. The Court of Criminal Appeals rejected two previous challenges to his conviction in November.

His boss was found beaten to death in Room 102 of his motel, the Best Budget Inn, on Jan. 7, 1997. Van Treese was 54 and lived in Lawton.

Sneed, a motel maintenance man, confessed to killing Van Treese with a baseball bat. He said Glossip pressured him into doing it and offered him $10,000 as payment. He testified against Glossip at two trials.

Glossip's attorneys claim Sneed actually killed the motel owner during a botched robbery for drug money. They claim he incriminated Glossip to avoid getting the death penalty himself.

They claim Sneed, a meth addict, made admissions in jail and later in prison about framing Glossip and also has talked of recanting his testimony.

In their latest challenge, Glossip's attorneys told the appeals court they had discovered after reviewing the prosecutors' notes that a jail psychiatrist had diagnosed Sneed with bipolar disorder. Glossip contends his defense attorneys could have used this crucial information at the retrial.

The attorney general in his April 6 filing wrote a defense attorney "likely could have attacked Sneed's ability to properly recall key facts at the second trial."

Sneed testified at the retrial that he was given lithium "for some reason" after at first getting Sudafed for a cold. "I don't know why," he told jurors. "I never seen no psychiatrist or anything."

That Sneed may have been diagnosed as bipolar has not come out before. However, the court on Thursday found it was "ascertainable" long ago because his lithium use came out in 1997 during a competency examination.

The court also found it would not have made a difference in the outcome had his lithium use been further developed at the retrial.

In a concurring opinion, Judge Gary Lumpkin quoted John Adams, one of the nation's founders and the second president. The judge wrote the court in its ruling on Glossip was following the law "and not depending on the various opinions voiced by men."

What's next for Richard Glossip?

Eight inmates have been executed in Oklahoma since lethal injections resumed in 2021 after a six-year moratorium.

Glossip could still avoid execution if Gov. Kevin Stitt grants him clemency or the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes.

The governor cannot consider clemency, however, unless the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board recommends it. The parole board is set to meet Wednesday morning.

The independent counsel, Rex Duncan, wrote in his 19-page report that there was a "decades-long failure" in the case.

Duncan was district attorney of Osage and Pawnee counties from 2011 to 2019. He was in the state House of Representatives before that for six years.

He also wrote: "If this murder was deserving of the death penalty, I believe the wrong co-defendant is on death row."

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Death row inmate Richard Glossip loses again, still faces May execution