Glossip v. Oklahoma: The Story Behind How a Death Row Inmate and the Oklahoma A.G. Concocted a Phantom “Brady Violation” and Got Supreme Court Review (Part I)

Next week the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Glossip v. Oklahoma. Death row inmate Glossip claims that the prosecutors at his murder trial withheld evidence from him. In a curious twist, the State of Oklahoma has reversed its long-held position supporting Glossip’s conviction and now joins Glossip. I have filed an amicus brief for the murder victim’s family, presenting important facts about the case the parties have concealed from the Court. In this three-part series, I review the true facts of the case.  Working together, Glossip and Oklahoma have concocted a phantom denial of evidence. In fact, the prosecutors never withheld any evidence from the defense. The Supreme Court should rapidly affirm the lower court’s decision upholding Glossip’s conviction and death sentence—and help bring the victim’s family closer to closure after more than two decades of litigation.

In this first post, I demonstrate that the alleged violation of Brady v. Maryland (requiring the State to provide exculpatory evidence to a defendant) simply never happened. The evidence that Glossip alleges prosecutors withheld was, in fact, fully known to the defense, as my amicus brief explains. Tomorrow, in the second post, I will review Glossip’s and Oklahoma’s (non)responses to this decisive point. Their silence in briefing before the Court is powerful support for my position. Finally, in the last post, I draw some broader conclusions about non-adversarial litigation such as this one. This case presents a cautionary tale about the dangers of courts simply accepting an elected prosecutor’s confession of “error,” which may be politically motivated.

The story begins on January 7, 1997, when authorities found the slain body of Barry Van Treese in a motel located in Oklahoma City that he owned. Van Treese had been missing for several hours that day. The subsequent search for Van Treese consumed everyone associated with the motel … everyone, that is, except Richard Glossip.

Glossip managed the motel and had allowed it to fall into disrepair in the latter months of 1996. Additionally, Van Treese and his wife, Donna, suspected that Glossip was embezzling money. Van Treese had planned on confronting Glossip about these issues on January 6, 1997. But Glossip said that encounter never happened. Instead, Glossip maintained that Van Treese was his normal self on that day.

As police were searching for Van Treese the next day, suspicion quickly fell on Glossip, who provided conflicting statements and sent investigators on false leads. Later, a friend of Glossip’s—Justin Sneed—would confess that he (Sneed) had murdered Van Treese and that Glossip had commissioned him to commit the murder. In 1998, a jury convicted Glossip and he was sentenced to death. After reversal of that conviction for ineffective assistance of counsel, in 2004 a jury again found Glossip guilty and he was sentenced to death based on testimony from Sneed and other witnesses. The judge who presided over the trial found Sneed “to be a credible witness on the stand,” as quoted at p. 46 of the 2022 State’s Submission to Parole Board. At sentencing, another judge echoed this conclusion, saying to Glossip: “I would say that  after observing the witnesses and hearing the testimony I have absolute confidence in the decision the jury reached, both to convict you, to find the aggravators and to impose the sentence of death,” as quoted at p. 48 of the same 2022 submission.

In 2007, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals (“OCCA”) affirmed Glossip’s conviction and sentence, rejecting Glossip’s claim that the evidence only proved his was an accessory after the fact. In the year

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Article from Reason.com

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