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Yesterday, the Supreme Courtroom announced that it might hear the attraction of Richard Glossip, now awaiting execution on Oklahoma’s dying row. Glossip, who’s one in all this nation’s best-known dying row inmates, was convicted and sentenced in 2004 for his function in an alleged murder-for-hire plot.
Seven years earlier, Glossip supposedly paid his co-defendant, Justin Sneed, to kill Barry Van Treese, who owned the motel the place Glossip was the supervisor. Sneed, a upkeep man on the motel, stabbed and beat Van Treese to dying with a baseball bat. He took cash from the motel and confessed to the theft and killing quickly after he was arrested.
Sneed would later play a key and troubling function in Glossip’s trial and conviction. Since that point, Glossip has had an odyssey of Kafkaesque proportions.
It consists of the truth that he has had a series of nine different execution dates. On a number of of those events, he had his “final” meal and stated his goodbyes to his household, solely to be spared on the final minute.
Meantime, the various vexing issues in Oklahoma’s dealing with of Glossip’s case have generated many authorized appeals and attracted nationwide and worldwide consideration from a wide range of people, including some of Oklahoma’s most conservative Republican legislators, who assume that if the state put him to dying it might be executing an harmless man. Alongside the way in which, there have been two unbiased investigations, every of which has shone a harsh gentle on the issues and misconduct that occurred in Glossip’s case.
These issues and that misconduct give the Supreme Courtroom loads of causes to overturn Glossip’s conviction and order a re-trial. However his attraction additionally provides the justices an opportunity to say as soon as and for all that the Structure forbids executing the harmless.
As a result of it’s an appellate courtroom, the Supreme Courtroom can’t by itself say Glossip is harmless. However it could possibly say that, as a matter of regulation, nobody who’s in that place must be topic to any punishment, most significantly capital punishment.
It has never before finished so. Certainly, in a 1983 case, Herrera v. Collins, it appeared to say the alternative.
In that case, a 6–3 majority concluded that proof of precise innocence was “not related” in a petition for a writ of habeas corpus “absent some [other] constitutional violation.” As Chief Justice William Rehnquist put it, “Due course of doesn’t require that each conceivable step be taken, at no matter value, to remove the potential for convicting an harmless particular person.… To conclude in any other case would all however paralyze our system for enforcement of the felony regulation.”
And after reviewing the historical past of the Structure’s due course of clause, Rehnquist concluded {that a} declare of “‘precise innocence’ is just not itself a constitutional declare.” In a concurring opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia agreed that the Structure doesn’t stop the federal government from executing somebody with new proof that signifies that they is perhaps “truly harmless”—somebody, which because the Washington Publish puts it, “with the potential to legally exhibit they didn’t commit the crime for which they have been convicted.”
Within the final thirty years, courts everywhere in the nation have cited Herrera as a motive to disclaim aid to individuals elevating innocence claims. And in 2022, the Supreme Courtroom seemed to reaffirm that call and once more dominated that appellate courts wouldn’t have to think about precise innocence claims.
Not surprisingly, Herrera has generated lots of controversy.
For instance, in 2009, Justice John Paul Stevens used a concurrence in another actual innocence case to look at that any statute that “bars aid for a dying row inmate who has established his innocence” is “arguably unconstitutional.” He advised that “selections of this Courtroom clearly assist the proposition that it might be an atrocious violation of our Structure and the ideas upon which it’s based mostly to execute an harmless particular person.”
If any case qualifies as an “atrocious violation” of the Structure, Glossip’s can be it. His cert. petition to the Courtroom makes that clear.
First, it paperwork a really troubling sample of prosecutorial misconduct. Because the petition notes, “even at this late stage of his case… new proof continues to emerge that the state knew full properly that the proof it used to convict [Glossip] and sentenced him to dying was false.”
The petition focuses on Sneed, who offered the important thing proof towards Glossip in return for the state’s settlement that he wouldn’t be sentenced to dying. The police repeatedly and falsely informed Sneed that Glossip was implicating him, finally convincing Sneed to level the finger at Glossip and testify towards him at trial.
Glossip’s petition notes that Sneed’s “credibility has at all times been tenuous.” It goes on to level out that on what it calls “seminal questions,” Sneed’s testimony was inconsistent.
Police and prosecutors coached Sneed “to vary his testimony on materials elements concerning the way through which he murdered Van Treese to keep away from conflicting with different proof, teaching he accepted and delivered upon” all through Glossip’s case.
Moreover, Sneed additionally lied on the witness stand when he denied that he was underneath the care of a psychiatrist and was taking medication for his bipolar dysfunction.
None of this was disclosed upfront of Glossip’s trial. This failure violated clearly established Supreme Court precedents.
As well as, Glossip’s petition alleges that the state of Oklahoma destroyed or misplaced key proof within the case. And right here, as elsewhere, Oklahoma Atty. Gen. Gentner Drummond has conceded that what Glossip alleges is true.
Glossip’s petition rightly factors out that the state’s mishandling of his case violates due strategy of regulation. And it asks the Courtroom to find out whether or not due course of requires reversal of a conviction the place it’s “so contaminated with errors that the state not seeks to defend it.”
For a Courtroom that now is generally reluctant to strike down death sentences at all, particularly when doing so would set up broad constitutional ideas, every of the questions that Glossip is asking it to reply offers a automobile for reversing his conviction and remanding it for a brand new trial.
However, the broad query which must be revisited is whether or not the Structure forbids “the execution of an harmless man who by no means had a good trial.” The Supreme Courtroom, Glossip’s petition suggests, “faces a stark alternative: whether or not the state of Oklahoma can execute an individual which chief regulation enforcement officer believes is wrongly convicted due to state misconduct.”
The reply must be an unequivocal no. For the Courtroom to stay silent about that alternative, or to keep away from dealing with it squarely, would do a rare disservice not solely to Richard Glossip, however to all People who consider it’s incorrect to punish the harmless.
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