Oklahoma’s new attorney general on Thursday agreed death row inmate Richard Glossip’s murder conviction should be overturned.
Glossip currently is set to be executed May 18 at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester for the 1997 murder of his boss.
“The State has reached the difficult conclusion that justice requires setting aside Glossip’s conviction and remanding the case to the district court,” Attorney General Gentner Drummond told the Court of Criminal Appeals in a seven-page filing.
Drummond made the request after deciding the key witness, Justin Sneed, gave false testimony at a 2004 retrial about his psychiatric condition.
Drummond made clear in the filing that he is not suggesting Glossip is innocent.
“The State continues to believe that Glossip has culpability in the murder of Barry Van Treese,” he told the appeals court.
Glossip, 60, has always maintained he is innocent, and his attorneys in March raised a new challenge to his conviction.
That challenge came after Glossip’s attorneys were given access on Jan. 27 to prosecutors’ notes “in the interest of full disclosure.”
What to know about Richard Glossip’s case
Glossip has become the state’s most high-profile death row inmate because of the wide support for his innocence claim. Among his supporters are conservative Republican legislators.
He also is high profile because of a twist of fate. His 2015 lethal injection was called off after a doctor realized the wrong heart-stopping drug had been delivered.
The attorney general on Jan. 26 announced that he had hired a former district attorney to look into Glossip’s innocence claim. Drummond said the independent counsel “concluded that Glossip’s conviction and sentence should be set aside.”
Glossip claims he was framed for the murder of Van Treese, an Oklahoma City motel owner. The Court of Criminal Appeals in November rejected two challenges to his conviction.
His boss was found beaten to death in Room 102 of his motel, the Best Budget Inn, on Jan. 7, 1997. Van Treese was 54 and lived in Lawton.
Sneed, a motel maintenance man, confessed to killing Van Treese with a baseball bat. He said Glossip pressured him into doing it and offered him $10,000 as payment. He testified against Glossip at two trials.
Glossip’s attorneys claim Sneed actually killed the motel owner during a botched robbery for drug money. They claim he framed Glossip to avoid getting the death penalty himself.
They claim Sneed, a meth addict, made admissions in jail and later in prison about framing Glossip and also has talked of recanting his testimony.
Among the claims in the latest challenge is that prosecutors kept secret that a jail psychiatrist had diagnosed Sneed with bipolar disorder. Glossip contends his defense attorneys could have used this crucial information at the retrial.
In his filing Thursday, the attorney general agreed Sneed “made misstatements to the jury.”
Eight inmates have been executed in Oklahoma since lethal injections resumed in 2021 after a six-year moratorium.