Oklahoma Lawmaker Calls for Investigation of Prosecutors Who Convicted Richard Glossip

On the day Don Knight was purported to witness his consumer’s execution on the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, he as an alternative stood within the press room on the state Capitol in Oklahoma City. “Today is the day that Richard Glossip was set to be killed by the state of Oklahoma,” he reminded reporters on Thursday afternoon. “An innocent man was set to be killed for the fourth time.”

Glossip’s life had been spared by Gov. Kevin Stitt, who paused the September 22 execution date amid explosive new proof within the case. The keep of execution adopted a petition filed by Knight to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, asking for a listening to to think about new proof that forged additional doubt on Glossip’s guilt. With a brand new execution date set for December 8, much more disturbing revelations had come to mild: together with proof of prosecutorial misconduct so alarming that state Rep. Justin Humphrey referred to as for an investigation into the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office.

“I was very reluctant, as a law enforcement officer, to look at this case,” Humphrey stated on the press convention. But the investigative failures in Glossip’s case shook him to the core. Today Humphrey is satisfied that not solely ought to Glossip by no means have been sentenced to die, he additionally by no means ought to have been despatched to jail. “Now I’m at the point we’re investigating the wrong people,” he stated, calling the federal government’s conduct in Glossip’s case “extremely unethical.”

Humphrey is one of greater than 60 state lawmakers who’ve raised alarm over Glossip’s case. The press convention got here on the heels of a 3rd report in as many months by the legislation agency Reed Smith LLP, which is conducting an unbiased investigation into the case on the lawmakers’ behest. Like the earlier stories, the most recent revelations expose how Oklahoma City prosecutors twice convicted Glossip regardless of clear indications that he was an harmless man.

Glossip was sentenced to loss of life for the 1997 homicide of Barry Van Treese on the Best Budget Inn, a rundown motel owned by Van Treese. No bodily proof linked Glossip to the crime. Instead, the case towards Glossip was virtually solely based mostly on the testimony of Justin Sneed, then 19, who admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to loss of life with a baseball bat inside Room 102. Sneed implicated Glossip because the mastermind behind the crime, however solely after a extremely coercive interrogation by Oklahoma City police detectives who repeatedly emphasised their perception that Glossip was concerned.

From the start, Sneed supplied wildly shifting accounts — beginning together with his confession to police and persevering with via every of Glossip’s trials, the place he was the star witness for the prosecution. In current years, Sneed has continued to contradict himself, whereas a slew of new witnesses have come ahead to say that he’d boasted about falsely implicating Glossip with a purpose to save his personal pores and skin.

After failing to persuade Stitt or the Oklahoma legal professional normal to research Glossip’s case, the Oklahoma lawmakers turned to Reed Smith in February 2022, and the agency took on the work professional bono. Thirty attorneys, three investigators, and two paralegals have reviewed over 12,000 paperwork and interviewed greater than 36 witnesses. The agency’s first report was launched in June. Since then they’ve launched two further stories, the newest on September 20. In all, the stories include bombshell revelations that paint the clearest image up to now of Glossip’s wrongful conviction.

Among essentially the most compelling items of new proof are handwritten letters from Sneed that reveal how shut he got here to taking again his story about Glossip. In 2003, a 12 months earlier than Glossip’s retrial, Sneed wrote to his public defender, asking, “Do I have the choice of re-canting my testimony at any time during my life, or anything like that.” In 2007, he despatched the lawyer another letter: “There are a lot of things right now that are eating at me,” he wrote. Things he wanted “to clean up.” Although he didn’t particularly point out recanting, he urged that he’d made a “mistake.” The lawyer, Gina Walker, who has since died, discouraged him from coming ahead.

The most up-to-date report digs deeper into Sneed’s conflicting statements, his efforts to recant, and prosecutors’ efforts to maintain him in line. Investigators with Reed Smith interviewed Sneed in jail thrice over the past month, for a complete of greater than eight hours. Portions of the interviews contained within the report present that Sneed’s account stays a large number of shifting narratives — save for his parroting of the important thing component of the prosecution’s principle of the case: that he was an impressionable younger man lured right into a homicide plot. “It is disconcerting that the only details he appears to state consistently are that he killed Barry Van Treese, and that Glossip is to blame for it,” the report says.

The letters from Sneed to his legal professional will not be the primary indication that Sneed sought to take again his story. In October 2014, O’Ryan Justine Sneed — Justin Sneed’s grown daughter — despatched a letter to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board saying that she “strongly believe[s]” that Richard Glossip is an harmless man. “For a couple of years now, my father has been talking to me about recanting his original testimony,” she wrote. “I feel his conscious [sic] is getting to him.”

In his interviews with Reed Smith, Sneed confirmed for the primary time that he had spoken to his daughter a couple of want to interrupt his plea deal and to recant. But he additionally insisted that by “recant,” he didn’t imply he essentially wished to vary his story. During an interview on August 26, Sneed advised Reed Smith that “it was more about silencing my testimony in the way of me not having to be there,” he stated, and “taking back the plea agreement.”

In all, Sneed has spent 11 years discussing recanting “with various individuals that he trusts,” Reed Smith famous. “When these admitted statements from Sneed made to his family in 2014 are combined with the recently obtained letters written by Sneed from 2003 and 2007, all discussing ‘recanting’ or needing to ‘clean things up’ it is deeply troubling.”

Bad Faith

Perhaps one of essentially the most gorgeous new revelations is that the prosecutors who retried Glossip in 2004 have been conscious that Sneed had thought of recanting — and took extraordinary steps to maintain that from taking place. “In his August 25, 2022 interview, Sneed confirmed that he met with representatives of the District Attorney’s Office along with his attorney, Gina Walker, before Glossip’s retrial where his plea agreement and his not wanting to testify were discussed,” the report says.

Notes discovered within the prosecutors’ file doc a sequence of conferences with Assistant District Attorney Connie Smothermon, Sneed, and Walker relating to Sneed’s reluctance to testify — information that, by legislation, ought to have been turned over to the protection. Smothermon’s trial accomplice Gary Ackley advised Reed Smith he didn’t know something about this, and that it was trigger for concern. “Any prosecutor would be concerned about any cooperating witness in any big case regarding the uncertainty of the waffling back and forth and the disingenuous bad faith nature of such actions,” Ackley stated.

Not solely was this information by no means disclosed to the protection, Smothermon additionally apparently labored with Sneed’s legal professional as Glossip’s second trial was underway to maintain Sneed in line. In a May 2004 memo to Walker, Smothermon laid out six detailed questions for Sneed based mostly on the testimony already delivered by different witnesses on the retrial. The obvious aim was to attempt to sq. Sneed’s testimony with what others had stated: a maneuver that will violate guidelines designed to insulate witness testimony from being contaminated by exterior information or from the testimony of one other witness.

The most egregious instance entails testimony from Dr. Chai Choi, the medical expert who carried out Van Treese’s post-mortem. At the retrial, Choi testified that Van Treese had puncture wounds, “a stabbing-type injury,” to his chest. Although there was a knife discovered on the scene, Sneed had beforehand stated that he didn’t use the knife — an inconsistency that Smothermon sought to repair earlier than Sneed took the stand.

“Our biggest problem is still the knife,” Smothermon wrote within the memo to Walker. “Justin tells the police that the knife fell out of his pocket and that he didn’t stab the victim with it.” But when Sneed took the stand on the retrial, he testified for the primary time that he had in reality stabbed Van Treese. “This reversal of his statement given to police does not appear to be a coincidence,” Reed Smith wrote. “Rather, it appears to be manufactured in response to ADA [Smothermon’s] communication during trial to Sneed’s attorney explicitly about what had been testified to by other witnesses about the knife.”

Ackley advised Reed Smith that the change in Sneed’s testimony was “night and day,” and that if it was prompted by Smothermon’s memo, it could be an issue.

At the press convention, Knight, Glossip’s legal professional, once more emphasised the necessity for an evidentiary listening to. “It becomes ever more apparent with each passing day that not only did the prosecution destroy evidence, they manufactured evidence. They changed people’s testimony. They broke the rules. All to try to get a conviction against Rich Glossip on a death penalty case that should never have been brought at all,” he stated. “The thing that I think everybody needs to take away from this: Rich Glossip is a nobody. He’s not some powerful person. He’s just like all the rest of us. This is what the government can do when they’re allowed to run amok.”