Former death row inmate should get new trial over 1974 murder, new DA says
For almost 50 years, convict Glynn Ray Simmons has insisted he was in a suburb of New Orleans when a store clerk was fatally shot during a liquor store robbery in Edmond on Dec. 30, 1974.
"I don't know where Edmond's at," the former death row inmate told the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board in 1991.
"No matter how long I stay here, I'll say the same thing."
At his murder trial, alibi witnesses testified he was playing pool in Harvey, Louisiana, that day. A jury convicted him anyway, after a customer identified him as one of the two robbers.
On Friday, Oklahoma County District Attorney Vicki Behenna asked a judge to grant Simmons a new trial to best serve justice.
District Judge Amy Palumbo could rule on the request as early as Tuesday. Simmons remains in prison for now.
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Police report on suspect lineup prompted request, DA says
The new DA said she was making the request because a significant police report on a suspect lineup was not turned over to his defense attorney for trial.
"One of the things that I stand by very strongly is a defendant's right to a fair trial, where he has all the evidence to defend himself. That didn't happen here. That's why we made the decision that we would move ... for a new trial," she said at a news conference.
Behenna took office in January. She stepped down as executive director of the Innocence Project in Oklahoma last year to campaign.
The customer, Belinda Sue Brown, continues to say that she identified the correct man. She was shot in the head during the robbery.
"This is not a case where there is new evidence of factual innocence," Behenna said. "There's not new DNA evidence. There's not a witness that has recanted their testimony."
Killed during the robbery was Carolyn Sue Rogers. Also convicted of first-degree murder was Don Roberts.
Jurors chose death as punishment for both men at their trial. Their sentences were modified to life in prison in 1977 because of U.S. Supreme Court rulings on capital punishment.
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Roberts was released on parole in 2008. He is 70.
Simmons testified in his own defense at trial, telling jurors he moved to Oklahoma for the first time in January 1975 to look for work.
He is now 70. He was 22 when he was convicted of murder at his 1975 trial. He was convicted at a trial in Okfuskee County in 1986 of escape.
His attorney, Joe Norwood of Tulsa, praised the DA for asking for a new trial.
"A lot of credit should go to her for doing what many prosecutors before would not," he said.
Norwood said there is no doubt in his mind that Simmons is an innocent man.
"There are around 10 witnesses who will say definitively Glynn Simmons was in Harvey, Louisiana, on Dec. 30, 1974," he said.
He said the withheld police report shows the eyewitness identified two other people during the lineup, not Simmons.
"It was hard for the defense counsel back then to impeach her credibility because they did not have the evidence," Norwood said.
An Oklahoma City federal judge in 1998 rejected Simmons' complaints about the undisclosed police report on the lineup. The district attorney in 1975 was Curtis Harris, who died of a heart attack a year later.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Former Oklahoma death row inmate could get retrial over 1974 shooting
