The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that Richard Glossip, a man sentenced to die under extraordinarily dubious circumstances, must receive a new trial. The case is Glossip v. Oklahoma.
The Supreme Court hands down a rare victory for a death row inmate
Richard Glossip had everything going for him in his Supreme Court hearing. That turned out to be enough.
Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.
The Court, which has a 6-3 Republican majority, is often unsympathetic to death row inmates who challenge their conviction or who seek to avoid execution. It’s unlikely that the Glossip case foreshadows a break with this trend, as Glossip brought an unusually strong case to the Supreme Court. Indeed, his case is strong enough that Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general, who ordinarily would be tasked with defending Glossip’s conviction, instead argued that Glossip’s trial was so flawed that it violated the Constitution.
In total, five justices — Chief Justice John Roberts, plus Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — voted to grant Glossip a new trial. Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed that Glossip’s constitutional rights were violated, but she would have sent the case to an Oklahoma appeals court instead. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented (Justice Neil Gorsuch was recused).
Many powerful players within Oklahoma raised serious doubts about Glossip’s conviction, and the state produced two investigations laying out the many flaws in the case against Glossip. One investigation, conducted by the law firm Reed Smith on behalf of a group of several dozen state lawmakers, determined that a wide range of errors, destroyed evidence, and police failures “fundamentally call into question the fairness of the proceedings and the ultimate reliability of the guilty verdict against Glossip for murder.”
A second investigation, commissioned by state Attorney General Gentner Drummond, determined that “Glossip was deprived of a fair trial in which the State can have confidence in the process and result.”
Though the police investigation and prosecution of Glossip had many errors (I summarize some of them here), Sotomayor’s majority opinion in Glossip focuses on just one of them. Nearly two decades after Glossip’s conviction, the state revealed that a key witness falsely testified at trial that he’d never seen a psychiatrist. The prosecution never corrected that false testimony despite being aware of the witness’s previous psychiatric treatment.
That violates the Supreme Court’s decision in Napue v. Illinois (1959), which generally forbids prosecutors from introducing false testimony, and which typically requires prosecutors to correct such testimony when it occurs.
The case against Glossip is quite flimsy
In 1997, Justin Sneed, a maintenance worker at a motel owned by Barry Van Treese, killed Van Treese with a baseball bat. At the time, Glossip was the manager of this motel.
Glossip isn’t entirely innocent. According to his lawyers, Glossip “spoke to police voluntarily on the day of the murder and again after he was detained the next day, admitting that he took actions after Van Treese was killed that helped Sneed after the fact.” Initially, the state charged Glossip as an accessory after the fact, for helping to cover up the murder and clean up the murder scene. But that charge was later upgraded to murder.
There are many reasons to doubt the upgraded charge. At Glossip’s trial, the state’s theory was that Glossip masterminded the murder and hired Sneed to carry it out. However, there is significant evidence that the police railroaded Sneed into endorsing this theory. The Reed Smith report, for example, found that Sneed implicated Glossip in the murder itself “only after [lead] Detective [Robert] Bemo interjected his views that Sneed did not act alone, that Sneed could help himself, that Glossip was arrested, and that Glossip was blaming Sneed for the murder.”
Sneed testified against Glossip at his 2004 trial, and this testimony was the only direct evidence connecting Glossip to the murder. The state, which supported Glossip’s call for a new trial, describes Sneed as an “indispensable witness.”
But Sneed was also a much more flawed witness than prosecutors allowed the jury to believe. During that trial, Sneed falsely testified that he had “never seen no psychiatrist or anything.” Though he’d been prescribed lithium, a drug used to treat some mental illnesses, while he was in jail for Van Treese’s murder, Sneed suggested that this was a mistake and that he’d only asked for Sudafed to treat a cold.
In 2023, however, the state turned over a document to Glossip’s lawyers which undermined Sneed’s testimony and suggested that prosecutors knew that Sneed was lying during Glossip’s murder trial. That document, a page of handwritten notes by lead prosecutor Connie Smothermon, included notations indicating that Smothermon knew that Sneed was “on Lithium” as well as a reference to a “Dr. Trumpet.”
“Dr. Trumpet” turns out to be Dr. Larry Trombka, who was the jail psychiatrist while Sneed was incarcerated in that facility. Trombka prescribed lithium to treat Sneed’s bipolar disorder. And he later said that Sneed’s mental illness could have caused him to experience a “manic episode” that may have led him “to be more paranoid or potentially violent,” and that Sneed’s condition was “exacerbated by illicit drug use, such as methamphetamine.”
Had Glossip’s lawyers known about Sneed’s diagnosis and treatment during his 2004 trial, they could have used it to undercut Sneed’s testimony in several ways. For starters, the mere fact that Sneed testified falsely about his own medical history undermines his credibility and may have caused the jury to doubt the state’s essential witness.
Additionally, had defense attorneys known about Sneed’s mental health diagnosis, they could have raised doubts about the state’s murder-for-hire theory — instead arguing that Sneed committed murder as a spontaneous act brought about by a manic episode and his drug use.
As Sotomayor explains in the Court’s Glossip opinion, the Napue decision is quite favorable to someone, like Glossip, who is convicted based on false testimony that the prosecutor could have corrected. Napue calls for a conviction to be tossed out “so long as the false testimony ‘may have had an effect on the outcome of the trial.’”
Later Supreme Court decisions establish that “a conviction obtained by the knowing use of perjured testimony must be set aside if there is any reasonable likelihood that the false testimony could have affected the jury’s verdict,” and they suggest that this rule can only be overcome if the prosecution can “prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the error complained of did not contribute to the verdict obtained.”
Sotomayor’s opinion, in other words, merely followed these established precedents to their logical conclusion. There is a reasonable likelihood that a jury would have acquitted Glossip if it had known that Sneed’s testimony was false. And that’s enough to grant him a new trial.
