Oklahoma actually, actually needs to execute Richard Glossip whose execution is now scheduled for September 22. When Oklahoma introduced its plan to execute 25 people in 29 months, it included Glossip on the listing. Glossip’s is one of this nation’s most infamous dying circumstances.
Oklahoma’s plan to put him to dying marks the fourth time that Glossip has had an execution date. On three earlier events, he has eaten his “last” meal and stated his goodbyes to his household, solely to be spared at the final minute.
As Vice News reports, his first execution, again in 2015, “was delayed due to a Supreme Court case against the state. The second, later that year, was stayed a mere three hours before Glossip was scheduled to be put to death. A new execution date was set for that same month but was then cancelled after the state discovered they had the wrong drug.”
Whatever the end result of Oklahoma’s newest effort, Glossip’s case illustrates the some ways in which the dying penalty betrays America’s values and commitments.
It provides an instance of unfairness and arbitrariness in the means dying sentences are handed out, a course of that’s incompatible with this nation’s dedication to equal safety below the regulation.
Glossip introduced a 2015 Supreme Court case that highlights our persevering with and futile seek for humane strategies of execution, regardless of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of merciless and strange punishment.
And his case reminds us of the very real risk of putting innocent people to death, a chance that shocks the conscience and is out of step with our traditions and values.
Let’s begin with the unfairness of Glossip’s dying sentence.
He was convicted and sentenced to death for his position in an alleged murder-for-hire plot. Glossip supposedly paid his co-defendant, Justin Sneed, to kill Barry Van Treese in 1997. Van Treese owned the motel the place Glossip was the supervisor.
Sneed, a upkeep man at 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.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Sneed took a deal that the prosecution provided him after the police advised that Glossip was pinning the blame solely on him. The deal: plead responsible and testify in opposition to Glossip in change for a life in jail sentence.
Sneed told the police that Glossip needed Van Treese killed so he “could run the motel without him being the boss.”
Such plea bargains play an vital position in the prosecution of dying circumstances.
As Kent Scheidegger wrote in 2009, “More defendants plea bargain to a life or long sentence in states where the death penalty is available. The average county with the death penalty disposes of 18.9% of murder cases with a plea and a long sentence, compared to 5.0% in counties without the death penalty.”
Glossip’s is one of the countless death cases in which one individual will get off with a lighter sentence after offering incriminating proof in opposition to another person.
From the begin, Glossip, who had by no means earlier than been arrested, maintained his innocence. When he was provided a plea cut price that will have spared his life, he refused to settle for the deal and was convicted at trial.
Since his preliminary dying sentence Glossip additionally has tried to expose the cruelty of execution by lethal injection, in specific when it entails the sedative midazolam. In litigation that reached the Supreme Court, he contended that midazolam’s unreliability would make his execution merciless and inhumane.
My analysis on deadly injection revealed that midazolam executions, on common, take longer to full and are extra possible to be botched than executions utilizing different drug mixtures. Some of these botched executions, together with the Oklahoma executions of Clayton Lockett in 2014 and John Grant in 2021, have been ugly spectacles of cruelty.
Nonetheless, the Court held that Glossip failed to present that midazolam executions created a “risk of severe pain and that the risk is substantial when compared to the known and available alternatives.”
After the Court’s ruling, Glossip joined one other lawsuit that once more challenged Oklahoma’s deadly injection drug cocktail. But in June 2022, a federal district choose, making use of the check devised by the Court in his earlier case, ruled that the plaintiffs had fallen “well short of clearing the bar set by the Supreme Court” for deadly injection challenges.
If the state succeeds in its newest plan to kill Glossip, he could endure the similar sort of dying as Lockett or Grant as a result of Oklahoma is once more planning to use midazolam in its executions.
But we must always return to the most troubling facet of this case: Glossip could be harmless.
After Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt refused their request to assessment issues in Glossip’s case in June 2021, a group of Oklahoma legislators commissioned an unbiased investigation. It was carried out by ReedSmith, a prestigious Oklahoma City regulation agency.
As Vice News notes, the agency reviewed “12,000 documents, 36 witness interviews, seven juror interviews, and other evidence.”
Its report presented intensive proof of issues with the authentic police investigation and confirmed that the state “had intentionally destroyed significant evidence before trial.”
It additionally discovered that the police had unduly influenced Sneed to implicate Glossip. Sneed did so solely “after the detectives mentioned Glossip’s name to Sneed six times during his interrogation.” The investigation additionally “uncovered additional evidence, never presented to the jury or to any court, that would likely have led to a different outcome” in his case.
The report concluded that “no reasonable juror hearing the complete record would have convicted Richard Glossip of first-degree murder” and, as a consequence, that his trial “cannot be relied on to support a murder-for-hire conviction. Nor can it provide a basis for the government to take the life of Richard E. Glossip.”
It appears unimaginable, in the face of these findings, that Oklahoma would proceed with its deliberate execution. But issues like these uncovered in Glossip’s case are a common incidence in America’s dying penalty system.
The Innocence Project notes that what it calls “Snitch testimony,” particularly an incarcerated particular person or co-defendant testifying in opposition to another person, is “the leading cause of wrongful convictions in capital cases, accounting for 45 percent of wrongful death penalty convictions since 1973.”
Today 34 state legislators in Oklahoma, together with 28 Republicans, need the state to give Richard Glossip as a substitute of executing him. One of them, Republican Representative Kevin McDugle, a long-time dying penalty supporter, has promised that “‘If we put Richard Glossip to death, I will fight in this state to abolish the death penalty, simply because the process is not pure.’”
McDugle’s vow could not be certain that justice is finished in Glossip’s case. But Glossip’s is much from an remoted instance of injustice in the dying penalty system. Problems of unfairness, cruelty, and the threat of executing the harmless are all too frequent. And the dying penalty course of is hardly “pure.”
That is why Americans in all places ought to be part of in efforts to finish it—and shortly.
story by The Texas Tribune Source link