Just minutes after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its opinion granting Richard Glossip a new trial, his attorney Don Knight started receiving an avalanche of texts. “My phone blew up, my email blew up,” Knight said. By the time he spoke to his client on the phone, Glossip had already heard the news. His wife Lea had read the opinion to him over the phone: The court had ruled that Oklahoma City prosecutors failed to correct the false testimony of their star witness against Glossip and that his conviction and death sentence could not stand. “Because the prosecution violated its obligations,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the court’s majority, “we reverse the judgment below and remand the case for a new trial.”
The opinion was a stinging rebuke to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, which has repeatedly rejected Glossip’s appeals despite mounting evidence of his innocence in the 1997 murder of motel owner Barry Van Treese. The ruling is also a major victory for Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who had previously taken the extraordinary step of asking the OCCA to vacate Glossip’s conviction after he concluded that it had been fatally tainted by prosecutorial misconduct. Finally, it is a momentous victory for Glossip, who has been scheduled for execution nine times and has been served three last meals, as well as for Knight who has spent the last decade fighting to free his client.
“Rich Glossip, who has maintained his innocence for 27 years, will now be given the chance to have the fair trial that he has always been denied.”
Glossip’s case will ultimately be sent back to Oklahoma City where the elected district attorney will have to decide whether Glossip should be retried. If she declines to do so, Glossip could soon walk out of prison.
“Today was a victory for justice and fairness in our judicial system,” Knight said in a statement. “Rich Glossip, who has maintained his innocence for 27 years, will now be given the chance to have the fair trial that he has always been denied.”
Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to die for the murder of Van Treese inside a seedy Best Budget Inn on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. No physical evidence linked Glossip, the motel’s live-in manager, to the crime. The case against him was based almost entirely on the testimony of a 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed, who admitted to bludgeoning Van Treese to death but insisted it was Glossip’s idea. In exchange for testifying against Glossip, Sneed escaped the death penalty and was sentenced to life without parole.
At trial, prosecutors portrayed Sneed — a chronic drug user prone to unpredictable bouts of violence — as a hapless follower who acted under Glossip’s complete control. “It’s as if Justin Sneed was a Rottweiler puppy … and Richard Glossip was the dog trainer,” prosecutors argued to Glossip’s jury in 2004. “No matter how you slice it, no matter how you parse it, the person that says ‘sic ’em’ is the person that makes the decision.”
In 2022, the state began releasing to Glossip’s attorneys boxes of previously undisclosed case documents revealing that Sneed gave false statements at Glossip’s second trial — and that prosecutors were aware of his misstatements yet failed to correct his testimony. In other words, jurors condemned Glossip to die based on the testimony of a known liar.
While he was in jail, Sneed had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium to manage it. However, when he testified against Glossip, Sneed denied ever seeing a psychiatrist and said he had no idea why he’d been given lithium.
The records included notes from a meeting between Sneed and prosecutor Connie Smothermon that took place not long before Glossip’s 2004 retrial. In the notes, Smothermon wrote the name of a doctor — “Dr. Trumpet?” — and a reference to the powerful mood stabilizing drug lithium — “on lithium?”
As Glossip’s lawyers later argued to the Oklahoma court, “Trumpet” was clearly a reference to Lawrence Trombka, the lone psychiatrist working in the Oklahoma City jail at the time Sneed was incarcerated there, and thus the only person authorized to diagnose Sneed’s disorder and to prescribe lithium. The notes made clear that Sneed had, at best, misrepresented the situation under oath, when he testified that while in jail he had a cold and asked for Sudafed, but that “somehow they ended up giving me lithium for some reason. I don’t know why,” he said. “I never seen no psychiatrist or anything.”
“So you don’t know why they gave you that?” Smothermon asked.
“No,” Sneed replied.
This exchange was at the heart of Drummond’s 2023 motion to vacate Glossip’s conviction. “There is no dispute that Sneed was the state’s key witness at the second trial. If Sneed had accurately disclosed that he had seen a psychiatrist, then the defense would have likely learned … the true reason for Sneed’s lithium prescription,” Drummond wrote in a motion to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. “With this information plus Sneed’s history of drug addiction, the state believes that a qualified defense attorney likely could have attacked Sneed’s ability to properly recall key facts at the second trial.”
In its ruling, the Supreme Court majority agreed. The entire case against Glossip rested on Sneed’s testimony, Sotomayor wrote in an opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “Because Sneed’s testimony was the only direct evidence of Glossip’s guilt of capital murder, the jury’s assessment of Sneed’s credibility was necessarily determinative here,” Sotomayor wrote. “Besides Sneed, no other witness and no physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese’s murder. Thus, the jury could convict Glossip only if it believed Sneed.” And Sneed’s credibility as a witness would have been undermined if the jury had been aware of the truth. Glossip’s prosecutors had failed to correct Sneed’s misleading testimony as they were constitutionally required to do, the court ruled. “A prosecutor’s midtrial revelation that Sneed lied on the stand would have significantly undercut” his account, Sotomayor wrote.
But the court did not stop there, noting that the violation was part of a constellation of prosecutorial misconduct. “Additional conduct by the prosecution further undermines confidence in the verdict,” Sotomayor wrote. The state had destroyed key evidence before Glossip’s retrial and had hidden evidence that Sneed sought to recant his testimony implicating Glossip in the crime. She also pointed to an attempt by state prosecutors to have Sneed revise his testimony about the murder to better conform to their theory of the crime.
The full-throated court victory came as a surprise to many close to the case, who had speculated after the court heard oral arguments last October that it would likely send the case back for an evidentiary hearing. In a partial dissent, Justice Amy Coney Barrett argued that this would have been the more appropriate action, while agreeing that prosecutors had violated Glossip’s constitutional rights. But the majority ultimately decided this was not necessary. “Because ample evidence supports the attorney general’s confession of error in this Court, there also is no need to remand for further evidentiary proceedings at the OCCA.”
Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the majority, writing his own opinion, which was joined by Justice Samuel Alito. In Thomas’s view Sneed’s testimony was “patently immaterial” to the outcome of Glossip’s trial. He also endorsed the OCCA’s absurd opinion that Sneed’s testimony was not “clearly false” because he “was more than likely in denial of his mental health disorders” — even though there was nothing in the record to support that assertion. The majority flatly rejected the idea. “Sneed’s beliefs are beside the point,” Sotomayor wrote. “What matters is that his testimony was false and a prosecutor knowingly let it stand nonetheless.”
At a press conference following the ruling, Drummond, who is running for Oklahoma governor, reiterated his support for the death penalty, emphasizing that he has attended all eight executions carried out since he took office. Drummond told reporters that when he became attorney general he reviewed all of the state’s death penalty convictions “and one stood out.” The “mission” of his office is to “seek justice, not to defend the prosecution,” he said, which is why he sought to have Glossip’s conviction overturned.
Drummond said he was “pleased the high court has validated my grave concerns with how this prosecution was handled, and I am thankful we now have a fresh opportunity to see that justice is done.”
Now, Glossip’s case will be returned to Oklahoma City where the current district attorney, Vicki Behenna, will review the evidence and decide whether to try Glossip for a third time. If she decides against doing so, Glossip would ultimately be released from prison. During his press conference, Drummond said he has conferred with Behenna and that the two plan to “review the evidence with fresh eyes.”
Twenty-eight years after the murder, and with no evidence aside from Sneed’s highly questionable account of the crime, it is hard to see how prosecutors could move forward with another trial. One potential resolution to the case is that they offer Glossip a deal to plead guilty to a lesser crime — specifically, of being an accessory-after-the-fact to Van Treese’s murder. This is arguably the only charge that ever had any basis in fact — and is what Glossip was originally charged with in 1997. On the night that he bludgeoned Van Treese, Sneed told Glossip that he’d killed the motel owner. Glossip didn’t immediately share this information with the police, he later told them, because he didn’t believe what Sneed was saying.
For now, Knight is preparing Glossip for whatever comes next. Knight credited his colleague, paralegal Meri Ellzey, for being an instrumental part of his decade-long fight to free Glossip, and he sounded cautiously optimistic that his client’s long ordeal will finally end.
“I’m still a one-step-at-a-time kind of guy,” Knight said. “I understand where I am right now, and I realize that, you know, I’m not to the finish line, but, by God, I can see it now.”
