Richard Glossip, a longtime death row inmate, will get a new trial after the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the prosecutors withheld evidence and provided the jury with faulty testimony from a star witness.
The court ruled 5-3 in favor of Glossip’s appeal, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor writing the opinion. She said that prosecutors’ failure to correct the false testimony violated Glossip’s due process rights, which “entitled” him to a new trial.
Sotomayor was joined in her opinion by Justices John Roberts, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, while Amy Coney Barrett partially joined the opinion, and partially dissented. Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, and Neil Gorsuch sat out the case (he was a federal appellate judge on the Oklahoma court that previously dealt with litigation tied to Glossip’s case).
Glossip has been on death row for nearly three decades, and his case has garnered significant support not just from anti-death penalty activists, but Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General, who asked the Supreme Court to throw out Glossip’s conviction and order a retrial.
Glossip was originally sentenced to death in 1997 after being convicted of a murder-for-hire plot involving his boss, hotel owner Barry Van Treese (Glossip has long denied the allegation). That conviction was rooted largely in the testimony of Justin Sneed, an adolescent maintenance man, who beat Van Treese to death with a baseball bat. Sneed pleaded guilty to the charges against him, received a life sentence, and agreed to testify that Glossip ordered him to kill Van Treese.
Over the years, Glossip has come close to being executed numerous times, eating his last meal on three separate occasions and twice listening as two men were put to death with botched lethal injections (as Rolling Stone reported in 2021). Each time, however, Glossip’s execution was stayed, and as further investigations were made into Glossip’s case, more evidence emerged suggesting his conviction was faulty.
In 2023, an independent law firm returned a report — conducted at the bipartisan behest of Oklahoma state lawmakers — that turned up a trove of new documents that cast doubt on Sneed’s testimony. Specifically, the investigation claimed that prosecutors had withheld evidence from Glossip’s defense that Sneed had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder in prison and had been prescribed lithium. Those two items could make Sneed an unreliable witness, while Glossip’s lawyers also argued the withholding of that evidence in and of itself violated due process laws.
A lawyer for Glossip did not immediately return Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.
