The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that Richard Glossip, who is on death row in Oklahoma for his role in the 1997 murder of motel owner Barry Van Treese, should get a new trial. In a decision by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the majority agreed that prosecutors violated their obligation to correct false testimony, and that the jury might not have sentenced him to death if the testimony had been corrected.
Prosecutors have never contended that Glossip himself killed Van Treese, who owned the Oklahoma City motel where he worked. Justin Sneed, who worked as a handyman at the motel, confessed to murdering Van Treese, but testified that Glossip paid him to do so. In exchange for his testimony, Sneed was spared the death penalty.
Glossip has maintained that he had no part in the murder.
In 2023, Glossip returned to state court in another effort to set aside his conviction and sentence. He contended that the state had recently given him for the first time files indicating that prosecutors knew, but failed to tell either Glossip or his lawyers, that Sneed had been prescribed lithium for bipolar disorder after his arrest and had lied about it. Prosecutors allowed Sneed to testify falsely that he had never been treated by a psychiatrist and that he had been accidentally prescribed the drug for a cold.
After two different independent reports questioned the validity of Glossip’s conviction and death sentence, the state’s attorney general, Gentner Drummond, joined Glossip’s request for the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest court for criminal cases, to set aside his conviction, as well as his plea for clemency from the state’s Pardon and Parole Board.
Both requests were unsuccessful. But the Supreme Court agreed to put Glossip’s execution on hold and to take up his case.
In a 29-page opinion, the justices on Tuesday reversed the state court’s ruling and sent Glossip’s case back for a new trial.
Under the Supreme Court’s 1959 ruling in Napue v. Illinois, Sotomayor explained, prosecutors violate the Constitution when they knowingly obtain a conviction using false evidence – either by soliciting false testimony or allowing false testimony to stand without correcting it. When that happens, she continued, the defendant is entitled to a new trial if there is a reasonable chance that the false testimony could have affected the jury’s decision.
In this case, Sotomayor reasoned, Sneed’s testimony was false, but prosecutors knowingly failed to correct it. Sneed was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and received lithium while at the local sheriff’s department, and a psychiatrist testified both that he was the only health-care provider who could have prescribed the lithium and that lithium is only used to treat psychiatric conditions. “The evidence likewise establishes,” she added, “that the prosecutors knew Sneed’s statements were false as he testified to them.”
And if prosecutors had corrected Sneed’s testimony, Sotomayor wrote, there is reason to believe it would have made a difference. Because “Sneed’s testimony was the only direct evidence of Glossip’s guilt of capital murder,” Sotomayor observed, the jury could only convict him if it found Sneed credible – which it would have been less likely to do if prosecutors corrected Sneed. As a result, Sotomayor concluded, “Glossip is entitled to a new trial.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part. In her view, the Supreme Court went too far when it ordered the state court to set aside Glossip’s conviction and a new trial. Although she agreed with the majority that the state court had misapplied Napue, she would have simply sent the case back to allow it to make findings about the significance of some of the evidence on which the majority relied to conclude that prosecutors failed to correct false testimony by Sneed.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion joined by Justice Samuel Alito and, in part, by Barrett. In his view, the Supreme Court “lacks the power to override” the denials of relief by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals and the state’s pardon and parole board. “Instead,” Thomas lamented, the Supreme Court “stretches the law at every turn to rule in” Glossip’s favor. Tuesday’s ruling, he concluded, “distorts our jurisdiction, imagines a constitutional violation where none occurred, and abandons basic principles governing the disposition of state-court appeals.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in the case, presumably because he was involved in earlier iterations of the proceedings while a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, which includes Oklahoma.
This post is also published on SCOTUSblog.
