Justices take up bid to overturn Oklahoma death sentence

SCOTUS NEWS

Eight years after the Supreme Courtroom blocked his execution in order that it might think about a problem to Oklahoma’s lethal-injection protocol, the justices agreed on Monday to take up the case of Richard Glossip, who’s looking for to put aside his conviction and dying sentence. In an uncommon twist, Oklahoma Legal professional Common Gentner Drummond supported Glossip’s petition for evaluation, telling the court docket that “justice wouldn’t be served by transferring ahead with a capital sentence that the State can not defend due to prosecutorial misconduct and cumulative error.”

Glossip was sentenced to dying for the 1997 homicide of Barry Van Treese, the proprietor of the Oklahoma Metropolis motel the place Glossip labored as a supervisor. The one proof implicating Glossip in Van Treese’s dying was testimony from Justin Sneed, a handyman on the resort, who informed jurors that Glossip paid him $10,000 to kill Van Treese. In alternate for his testimony, prosecutors assured Sneed that he can be spared the dying penalty.

Glossip requested an Oklahoma court docket to put aside his conviction and sentence final yr. He stated that in January 2023 he had obtained new info, together with prosecutors’ notes, indicating that Sneed had testified falsely about whether or not he had seen a psychiatrist when he had in truth been handled for bipolar dysfunction and prescribed lithium.

Drummond appointed Rex Duncan, a former district legal professional in Oklahoma, as an unbiased counsel to evaluation Glossip’s case. In April 2023, Duncan reported that he believed a brand new trial was mandatory as a result of “Glossip was disadvantaged of a good trial by which the State can believe within the course of and end result.”

Based mostly on Duncan’s report, Drummond joined Glossip in asking the Oklahoma Courtroom of Felony Appeals, the state’s highest court docket for prison instances, to put aside Glossip’s conviction, however the court docket rejected that request. Lower than per week later, the state’s Pardon and Parole Board turned down Glossip’s request for clemency, which the legal professional normal – apparently for the primary time within the state’s historical past – had additionally supported.

Together with his execution scheduled for Could 18, 2023, Glossip got here to the Supreme Courtroom, asking the justices – with Drummond’s help – to place his execution on maintain to provide them extra time to think about his appeals. In a brief, unsigned order in early May, the justices agreed to take action.

After contemplating Glossip’s appeals at 11 consecutive conferences, the justices agreed to resolve whether or not the state violated Glossip’s constitutional rights when prosecutors suppressed proof that their key witness was underneath a psychiatrist’s care. The court docket didn’t act on a second petition that Glossip had filed, and which the state had opposed, involving whether or not the burden that Oklahoma courts imposed on Glossip to indicate that he was harmed by the state’s suppression of proof which may have cleared him was too excessive.

The justices additionally directed Glossip and the state to handle a separate query: whether or not the ruling by the Oklahoma Courtroom of Felony Appeals rested on an “enough and unbiased state-law” floor (particularly, that Glossip was not entitled to reduction underneath state post-conviction regulation), which the Supreme Courtroom would lack the ability to evaluation.

Justice Neil Gorsuch didn’t take part within the consideration of Glossip’s request, presumably as a result of he had weighed in on one in all Glossip’s earlier appeals when he served as a decide on the U.S. Courtroom of Appeals for the tenth Circuit. He didn’t point out if he’ll recuse himself from the case going ahead.

The justices added one other case to their deserves docket on Monday, setting the newest chapter in a dispute over the waters of the Rio Grande River “for oral argument in the end.” The case started a decade in the past as an action by Texas against New Mexico, alleging that New Mexico had violated a 1938 settlement to divide the river’s waters amongst Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado.

In 2022, Texas and New Mexico reached a settlement, and an knowledgeable appointed by the court docket beneficial that it’s authorized. However the federal authorities, which had joined the lawsuit, objected to the settlement, and now the justices will weigh in.

The court docket as soon as once more didn’t act on a number of of the high-profile petitions that it thought-about final week, together with a request by parents and alumni to evaluation the constitutionality of the admissions coverage of a prestigious public magnet faculty within the Washington, D.C., suburbs and a pair of challenges to the constitutionality of New York’s rent-stabilization system. The justices first thought-about the New York rent-stabilization instances, 74 Pinehurst v. New York and 335-7 LLC v. New York, at their convention on Sept. 26, 2023 – the identical convention at which the justices thought-about Richard Glossip’s petition for evaluation for the primary time.

The justices are actually of their four-week winter recess. Their subsequent commonly scheduled convention is Friday, Feb. 16.

This text was originally published at Howe on the Court.