OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Oklahoma has set execution dates nine times for death row inmate Richard Glossip. The state has fed him three “last meals.” Glossip has even been married twice while awaiting execution.
Somehow, he’s still here, even after the Supreme Court rejected his challenge to Oklahoma’s lethal injection process nine years ago.
Now, in another twist, Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general has joined with Glossip in seeking to overturn his murder conviction and death sentence in a 1997 murder-for-hire scheme. This unlikely turn has put Glossip’s case back at the Supreme Court, where the justices will hear arguments Wednesday.
The court’s review of Glossip’s case comes amid a decline in the use of the death penalty and a drop in new death sentences in recent years. At the same time, though, the court’s conservative majority has generally been less open to efforts to halt executions.
It’s exceedingly rare for prosecutors to acknowledge they, or perhaps their predecessors, made serious mistakes that led to the imposition of death sentences.
But that’s precisely what Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond did, in calling for Glossip to get a new trial.
Prosecutors in at least three other death penalty cases in Alabama and Texas have pushed for death row inmates to be given new trials or at least spared the prospect of being executed. The inmates are: Toforest Johnson in Alabama, and Melissa Lucio and Areli Escobar in Texas. In another similar case, the justices refused a last-minute reprieve for Marcellus Williams, whom Missouri executed last week.
“All of these cases are telling the public that the death penalty system, as it is currently being used, cannot be trusted to end up in a fair and just result,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
Glossip has always maintained his innocence in the 1997 killing in Oklahoma City of his former boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese, in what prosecutors have alleged was a murder-forhire scheme.
