ON JUNE 29, the very day the United States Supreme Court upheld Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol in Glossip v. Gross, signaling to the state that it could resume executions, State Attorney General Scott Pruitt wasted no time. His office sent a request to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals asking that death warrants be signed for the next three men in line for the gurney — the same three men whose challenge had made it all the way to Washington. “The above inmates have exhausted all regular state and federal appeals,” the attorney general wrote, respectfully urging the Court to schedule their executions. On Wednesday, July 8, the Court complied, setting three dates for the fall.
Richard Glossip is first in line to die, on September 16. As the lead plaintiff in the case before the Supreme Court, his name became synonymous with the legal fight over midazolam, a drug linked to a number of botched executions, but which the Court decided is constitutional for carrying out lethal injections. Glossip, who spoke to The Intercept hours after the ruling, did not have time to dwell on the decision. Even if the Court had ruled in his favor, he pointed out, Oklahoma remained determined to execute him and has provided itself with a range of options for doing so — most recently, adding nitrogen gas to the mix. With a new execution date looming, “I’m trying to stop them from killing me by any method,” Glossip said, “because of the fact that I’m innocent.”
Richard Glossip, 2014.
Photo: Janelle Stecklein
“I’m trying to stop them from killing me by any method, because of the fact that I’m innocent.”
Glossip has some outspoken supporters, including family members, the longtime anti-death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean, as well as his former defense attorney, Wayne Fournerat, who was adamant in a conversation with The Intercept that his former client is innocent. But last October a particularly unlikely figure came forward to plead that Oklahoma spare Glossip’s life: O’Ryan Justine Sneed — Justin Sneed’s grown daughter. In a letter to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board, she wrote that, based on her many communications with her dad, she “strongly believe[s]” that Richard Glossip is an innocent man. “For a couple of years now, my father has been talking to me about recanting his original testimony,” she wrote. “I feel his conscious [sic] is getting to him.”
Justine Sneed’s letter never reached the board. It arrived in the mail too late for Glossip’s attorneys to submit it for consideration. To date, Sneed himself has not come forward — according to his daughter, he fears what it could mean for his plea deal. Nor has she made any further public statements since her letter was published. (The Intercept made numerous attempts to reach her for an interview.) Her claims do not prove that Sneed lied, of course. But the available records in the 18-year-old case of Richard Glossip are themselves good reason for concern. From the police interrogation of Justin Sneed in 1997 to transcripts from Glossip’s two trials, the picture that emerges is one of a flimsy conviction, a case based on the word of a confessed murderer with a very good incentive to lie, and very little else. As Oklahoma gets ready to restart executions using its newly sanctioned lethal injection protocol, time is running out to answer the question: Could the state be preparing to kill an innocent man?
IT WAS SOMETIME after 4 a.m. on January 7, 1997, that 33-year-old Richard Glossip woke up to the sound of pounding on the wall outside his apartment at the Best Budget Inn in Oklahoma City. He lived there with his girlfriend of five years, D-Anna Wood; she later described waking up to “scraping on the wall.” It was “kind of scary loud,” she said.
Barry Van Treese
Photo: Oklahoma Court papers
It wasn’t particularly unusual for Glossip and Wood to hear noise late at night at the Best Budget Inn. By all accounts, the motel was a dump. Located just off the interstate on the city’s west side, it hosted drunks (and drunks fighting), drug-dealers (and police drug stings), and hookers (and other hook-ups coming out of the nearby strip club), according to interviews and court records. Rooms went for less than $30 a night. When Glossip got up and opened the door that morning, he saw the motel’s maintenance man, 19-year-old Justin Sneed. He had a black eye.
What happened next depends on who you believe. As Glossip tells it, Sneed told him that a couple of drunks had broken a window, “so I told him to fix the window,” he would later testify. “He’s the maintenance man.” According to Glossip, Sneed denied that the drunks were responsible for his injury — he said he had run them off. But then, Glossip says, Sneed said something crazy. As he turned to walk away, Glossip testified, “I said, ‘Come on, Justin.’ I said, ‘Really, what happened to your eye?’ He then looked at me and said he killed Barry.”
Glossip says he turned to look at the spot where Barry Van Treese always parked his car, under the canopy in front of the office. It wasn’t there, he said, so he assumed Van Treese had not yet returned from Tulsa, where he’d gone the night before to pay employees at the other motel. He says he figured Sneed was messing with him — some sort of “wisecrack,” as he recently told The Intercept. “I just looked at him and he didn’t look like — you know what I mean? I just didn’t take him serious,” he said. Glossip went back to bed.
But, in fact, Barry Van Treese really was dead. His car would be discovered later that morning, parked haphazardly in a nearby parking lot — and his body would be found that night, on the floor beneath a pile of bedding at the foot of the waterbed in Room 102. It was the nicest room in the motel, where Van Treese usually stayed when he came to do business at the Best Budget Inn. Now the walls and carpet were covered in blood.
Justin Sneed
Photo: Oklahoma DOC
By then, Glossip was already in custody, and had told police what Sneed had confessed to him about killing their boss. But it had taken Glossip a suspiciously long time to do so. When he was first questioned by police, on January 8, he made no mention of Sneed’s remark. Later he would testify that he had wanted to say something, but “D-Anna told me not to tell anybody until they knew for sure” that Van Treese was dead. Wood confirmed that this was the case in her own testimony. It was only when Glossip was taken in for questioning again the next day that he described the early morning exchange outside his apartment on January 7.
Regardless, Sneed soon confessed to police. He described how he had entered Room 102 using his master set of keys and, as Van Treese awoke, attacked him with a baseball bat. Van Treese fought back, knocking Sneed backward and breaking the window. But Sneed eventually overpowered him, beating him to death. The medical examiner would say that Van Treese received at least nine blows to the head. He died wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Jesus on it. It read, “Jesus Carry the Cross For Us.”
But upon confessing, Sneed said he did not act alone. While he acknowledged going to Glossip’s apartment and telling him he killed Van Treese, in his version of events, his boss was expecting him. Glossip had been pressuring him for months to murder Van Treese, Sneed explained. “Every time that Mr. Van Treese showed up [at the Best Budget Inn], he was wanting me to kill him,” he would testify in 1998. Sneed gave various explanations for why Glossip wanted Van Treese dead. “Richard was trying to tell me that with Mr. Van Treese out of the way, that he might be able to con the wife of the deceased into letting him run both of the motels,” he testified, adding that Glossip had offered to let him manage one of them. He also claimed that Glossip was worried that Van Treese — who had arrived at the motel on January 6 with plans to examine the 52 rooms in order to undertake any necessary repairs or renovations — would discover he had not been doing a good job maintaining the property and fire him.
Regardless of the precise motivations, according to Sneed, around 3:30 a.m. on January 7, Glossip called him in his room, 117, and told him it was time. Van Treese had just returned from his other motel in Tulsa, and was in Room 102. Sneed said that Glossip offered him several thousand dollars — he has given different amounts at different times — to go in and murder their boss, suggesting the baseball bat as a weapon. If he didn’t do it now, Glossip said, they would both be kicked out of the motel.
Sneed says he mulled it over for awhile, walking over to the nearby gas station for a Coke. In the end, he would say, “I guess I let my pride get a little bit in the way.” He went to Room 102 and killed Van Treese.
Photo: Sue Ogrocki/AP
THE SEQUENCE OF events that followed also depends on who you believe. But there were a number of details upon which Glossip and Sneed agreed, which are consistent with the testimony from others at the motel. Although they create more questions than answers, they suggest that there was no rush on anyone’s part to dispose of the body of Barry Van Treese.
Around 8:30 that morning, Glossip and Sneed went outside to cover the exterior of the broken window to Room 102 with plexiglass. (Sneed had previously placed a shower curtain over it.) Later, Glossip returned to his room to take a nap, then got up in the early afternoon to run some errands with Wood. After a visit to the optician for a new pair of glasses, Glossip bought Wood an engagement ring for about $100. Then they went to Walmart. By then, Van Treese’s car had been discovered; the desk clerk called Walmart and asked the store to page Glossip, who then returned to the Best Budget Inn. Van Treese’s body was discovered at 10 p.m. that night.
By the time the body was found, Sneed had already fled the motel. Police wouldn’t find him for five days.
The extent of the official investigation into the murder is unclear. The Oklahoma City Police Department has declined to release the entire police report. But, from the start, police appear to have largely taken their cues from a private investigator and former police officer named Cliff Everhart, who was the first to point the finger at Glossip as a suspect. Everhart did security work at the Best Budget Inn, and claimed to own a 1 percent interest in the motel. (Donna Van Treese, Barry’s widow, testified at each of Glossip’s two trials that she had no knowledge of Everhart’s alleged ownership stake in the family’s motel operation.)
After Van Treese’s car was discovered on the morning of January 7, but before anyone knew he was dead, Everhart drove around with Glossip and Wood searching in nearby dumpsters. (“And he said, ‘Barry, Barry, are you in here?’” Wood recalled on the stand.)
Why Everhart would direct the search party to area dumpsters is unknown, and he has since died. Everhart testified that it was his idea to check all of the surrounding areas — an empty field, the dumpsters — for signs of Van Treese. “[T]o see if Barry had wandered out and had passed out in the cold,” he testified in 2004. “I didn’t know what had happened.”
Oklahoma Police Sergeant Timothy Brown testified that he got involved in the search after seeing the group checking a dumpster by the neighboring McDonald’s, then pulling up to talk to them — though Everhart would testify in 2004 that it was he who called Brown to the motel to aid in the search. Later that night, Sergeant Brown accompanied Everhart to Room 102, where they found Van Treese’s body. In the meantime, it was Everhart who reportedly ordered a search of the rooms in the motel, which Sneed said he “pretended to do.”
Explaining his suspicion of Glossip, Everhart cited his “inconsistent stories” about the last time he claimed to have seen Van Treese. Others, including Sergeant Brown, echoed Everhart’s assertions, saying that Glossip claimed to have last seen Van Treese in the parking lot the morning of January 7, when in reality he was already dead.
Particularly damning was the testimony of Billye Hooper, the daytime desk clerk at the Best Budget Inn. She repeatedly testified that after she came into work that morning Glossip told her Van Treese had left an hour earlier, probably to get breakfast and some materials for renovating the motel rooms. According to Hooper, Glossip told her that Van Treese had stayed in Room 108 the night before, and that he had rented Room 102 to some drunks who ended up breaking the window. She said she found this strange, since 102 was “the nicest room in the place” and Van Treese was “a teetotaler and did not like people that drank at all.” She further testified that Glossip told her to leave Room 102 off the housekeeping list, because he and Sneed were going to go take care of the window. (Sneed would testify that he was the one who told the maid to ignore Room 102.)
Although Hooper’s testimony was consistent throughout the prosecution, Glossip staunchly denies that it was accurate. “I never told her that, ever,” he told The Intercept, suggesting that Hooper held a grudge against him. Glossip said he always had a decent relationship with Hooper, who has since died, until she injured herself off the job and was for a while unable to work. During that time, Glossip said he ran the motel alone, “24/7.” When Van Treese notified Glossip that he was going to put Hooper back on the payroll even though she wasn’t yet back at work, Glossip said he scoffed. When Hooper returned to work, Glossip said their relationship was never the same.
Glossip has consistently denied telling anyone that he saw Van Treese that morning, testifying that people must have misinterpreted his estimates about seeing him around the seven-o’clock hour as referring to a.m. rather than p.m. He insists he meant he’d last seen his boss the evening before, at 7:50 at night, before Van Treese left for Tulsa.
No one had ever heard Sneed or Glossip speak of a murder plot.
In any event, apart from the intimations of Hooper and Everhart, no one had ever heard Sneed or Glossip speak of a murder plot. None of Van Treese’s belongings turned up in Glossip’s possession. And although Sneed claimed that Glossip accompanied him to Room 102 after the murder, there was no physical evidence to link him to the crime.
Instead, it was Glossip’s behavior after the fact that came under scrutiny. For example, in the days after the murder, Glossip sold a number of furnishings — a futon, an entertainment system, two vending machines, and an aquarium, suggesting he was seeking to make a hasty getaway. At a preliminary hearing in April 1997, when Wood was asked why Glossip would sell off those items, she explained that her birthday was coming up in May and that she wanted breast implants.
According to Glossip, however, he’d actually sold his belongings to pay for an attorney. After he was first questioned by police about Van Treese’s murder on January 8, a friend cautioned him not to speak to them again without talking to a lawyer. Glossip says he heeded his friend’s advice. Between his recent paycheck, some money he’d been stashing away, and the profit from selling some possessions, he’d come up with just over $1,700 to pay an attorney. Indeed, he was picked up by police on January 9 as he exited the lawyer’s office.
The state later claimed that the $1,700 Glossip was carrying was roughly half the amount Sneed admitted to stealing from Van Treese’s car. In the official record, it is unclear exactly how much Van Treese had stashed under the car seat.
Glossip, who had no criminal record, was now under arrest for murder.
Photo: Sue Ogrocki/AP
TO HEAR THE STATE tell it, Richard Glossip is a monster who seduced Sneed, an uneducated and hapless dolt, into committing murder for him. Prosecutors at Glossip’s first trial described Sneed to the jury as “a desperate sort of a 19-year-old young man,” one who was “homeless” and “depended on Glossip for everything,” including meals, which Glossip sometimes denied him. It is true that Sneed received no salary for working around the Best Budget Inn, only room and board. Although this arrangement was not uncommon at the motel, the state cast Sneed as suffering a unique kind of indentured servitude. In fact, Sneed, who had come to Oklahoma as part of a storm-chasing crew of roofers from Texas, himself testified that he had enough money left over to sustain his pot and meth habit. He also said he hustled to support himself and did not rely entirely on Glossip.
Regardless, the prosecution’s theory goes like this: Glossip’s job was on the ropes because of financial shortages at the Oklahoma City motel — proof that Glossip was embezzling funds. In order to avoid being fired, and to secure himself the additional responsibility of simultaneously managing Van Treese’s second motel property in Tulsa, he planned to murder his boss and then convince Donna to turn the business over to him.
The evidence to support this theory was weak. Basic accounting records entered into evidence purported to show a roughly $6,100 shortage at the Oklahoma City Best Budget Inn at the end of 1996. More detailed records, which had been requested by the defense, had apparently been destroyed in a flood. Moreover, Glossip had received a bonus in 11 out of 12 months in 1996, a reward for bringing in business above the monthly income baseline that Van Treese had set. Notably, none of the other motel employees or long-term guests provided any evidence that Van Treese was unhappy with Glossip’s performance or management of the motel.
Although the state eventually elicited testimony from witnesses suggesting that Sneed was a timid follower, and that Glossip was acting strangely while Van Treese was missing, there was little evidence to support its theory of the crime. Van Treese’s brother Kenneth, who took over operation of the motel after the murder, testified in 2004 that the motel’s financial shortages were “really insignificant amounts of money” and would not have worried Barry. The Oklahoma City motel, he said, was a “very profitable operation.”
Even so, two separate juries found the case against Glossip convincing enough to convict him and sentence him to die. Glossip’s first trial, in June 1998, was a disaster from the start. His defense attorney, Wayne Fournerat, tossed out alternative half-baked theories of the crime — despite the fact that Sneed had confessed to the killing — naming potential accomplices and alternate killers while examining witnesses, but without supplying any evidence to back up his insinuations. Twice during trial, including midway through the testimony of Billye Hooper, Fournerat told the judge it would be in Glossip’s best interest to take a blind plea — which Glossip, having already rejected a plea deal, again refused to do. “I don’t care what the circumstances say,” he told the judge. “I’m innocent.” Glossip turned down a similar offer of life with the possibility of parole in 2004, before his second trial.
In 2001, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals called the case against Glossip at the first trial “extremely weak.” Though it did not address the lack of evidence corroborating Sneed’s self-serving testimony, the court found Fournerat’s performance was so deficient that it alone provided sufficient grounds to overturn the conviction. Fournerat’s “conduct was so ineffective,” the court concluded, “that we have no confidence that a reliable adversarial proceeding took place.”
In particular, the court noted that Fournerat failed to introduce into evidence Sneed’s videotaped confession to police, and failed to use that crucial evidence to effectively cross-examine both Sneed and one of his interrogators, Detective Bob Bemo — a failure it described as standing out “as the most glaring deficiency in counsel’s performance.”
Had members of the jury watched the tape, they would have heard Bemo tell Sneed that before he decided whether or not to waive his rights and talk to the cops, he should consider the situation. “Before you make your mind up on anything,” Bemo cautioned him, “I want you to hear some of the things that we’ve got to say to you.” Sneed was read his rights, and then Bemo leaned in: “We know this involves more than just you, okay?” Sneed told Bemo that he didn’t “really know what to say about” what happened to Van Treese. Well, Bemo said, “everybody is saying you’re the one that did this and you did it by yourself and I don’t believe that. You know Rich is under arrest, don’t you?” No, Sneed said, he didn’t know that. “So he’s the one,” Bemo replied. “He’s putting it on you the worst.”
If Sneed didn’t want to talk about the involvement of anyone else, Bemo said he would be happy to walk Sneed into the jail and book him for Van Treese’s murder, “and you would be facing this thing on your own,” Bemo said. “And I don’t think it’s just you.”
Sneed obliged, confessing to the murder and blaming Glossip for it.
GLOSSIP’S SECOND TRIAL took place in 2004. This time he was represented by lawyers from the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System. But they also failed to introduce Sneed’s interrogation — and, again, without the actual evidence to show jurors, their cross-examinations of Sneed and Bemo were weak at best. Yet after a second conviction and appeal, the same appeals court dismissed the appointed lawyers’ failure to use the confession evidence. This time around, the omission was considered not as a glaring oversight, but as a sound decision made as part of a “valid” defense strategy.
Magnifying the situation is the fact that Sneed’s story of the plotting and murder of Van Treese had morphed considerably between his first confession to police in 1997 and his testimony at Glossip’s first trial in June 1998. Sneed’s story changed yet again when he testified at Glossip’s second trial in May 2004. Each time Sneed told his tale, it became more elaborate, and included many new details that painted Glossip as a man hell-bent on murder.
At Glossip’s first trial, Sneed testified that he had been offered $7,000 to kill Barry Van Treese, but that the money he discovered under Van Treese’s car seat was only $4,000, which they ended up splitting. “The money never really was on my mind,” Sneed testified. “I was just going along with everything he said, basically.” By the second trial, in 2004, Sneed insisted that Glossip had offered him up to $10,000. Every time he talked to Glossip about killing Van Treese, Sneed said, the amount of money would increase.
When Sneed described his instructions from Glossip to police a week after the murder, he claimed only that he had been told to cover up the broken window with plexiglass. On the stand at both trials, he said he was also instructed to pick up some trash bags, a hacksaw and some muriatic acid. At the second trial, he further described how Glossip had explained that muriatic acid was used to clean swimming pools, and that pouring it on Van Treese’s corpse would help “eat up a lot of the tissue.”
Other new details appeared at the 2004 trial. When Glossip allegedly went back to Room 102 with him to make sure Van Treese was dead — and before instructing him to move the car — Sneed testified that Glossip “opened Mr. Van Treese’s wallet” and pulled out a $100 bill, putting it in his pocket. No forensic evidence backed up this claim. And although it was the middle of winter — the high that day was 37 degrees — Sneed also said that Glossip instructed him to turn the air conditioning in Room 102 “up full blast” after the murder, because the body was going to be in the room all day and Glossip thought this “would keep the body from building up any stench.”
Sneed also elaborated on his earlier claims that Glossip had pressured him on multiple occasions to kill Van Treese. When he confessed to police in 1997, Sneed said that he had met Van Treese only a couple of times, including when he had to fix the televisions in the motel. On the stand in 2004, he recounted an incident in which he had once gone down to the motel’s boiler room to fix a TV with Glossip and their boss. Van Treese, he said, was crouched down with his back to them, “and that’s when, you know, Glossip is constantly asking me, you know, why don’t I do it right now, why don’t I just take that little hammer and knock him over the head with it.” According to Sneed, Glossip told him to kill Van Treese five or six times, but then Van Treese appeared to get “paranoid,” and left the room.
Finally, at Glossip’s second trial in 2004, Sneed testified that he had no idea that Glossip had been arrested when he gave his confession to police in 1997, or even that Glossip had been questioned about the crime. But the transcript from the interrogation clearly shows that Detective Bemo told Sneed that Glossip was already under arrest.
ARGUABLY, NOBODY is more familiar with Sneed’s various tales and embellishments than G. Lynn Burch, an Oklahoma defense attorney who represented Glossip for several years. It was Burch’s work on the first appeal that led the appellate court to overturn Glossip’s conviction. After that, he was asked to stay on and represent Glossip at the second trial. Burch was ready for the challenge, because he understood what needed to be done to ensure a fair trial — introduce Sneed’s confession tape and meticulously attack the various inconsistencies in his statement. He felt that approach would clearly demonstrate that Sneed was lying and that Bemo had coached him into a confession that implicated an innocent man. He never got the opportunity to do so. Bemo did not respond to repeated emails requesting comment.
Instead, not long before the second trial was slated to start, the case’s new prosecutor, Connie Smothermon, announced in the judge’s chambers that she was adding Sneed’s lawyer, Gina Walker, to her witness list. Walker was expected to testify that Sneed told her he’d been threatened by Burch, who interviewed him in prison before the trial. Their interaction was not recorded. Sneed alleged that Burch threatened that “he should change his testimony because something bad could happen to him,” Burch told The Intercept.
Burch was furious. The accusation was false — and, he believes, clearly designed to yank him off the case, to turn him from an attorney who would vigorously defend his client into a witness who would have to take the stand to rebut Sneed’s lie. As a result, Burch recused himself. Glossip’s two remaining attorneys, Silas Lyman and Wayne Woodyard, apparently decided not to aggressively challenge Sneed, whom Burch calls the “defense’s star witness,” during cross examination. They also failed to introduce the confession video into evidence and made only ham-handed attempts at cross examination.
Lyman did not return calls requesting comment and Woodyard, through an assistant, also declined to comment on the case.
THE ISSUES RAISED by Glossip’s case are not isolated. Indeed, they plague the criminal justice system as a whole and can have dire consequences for any defendant facing a capital trial.
Deficient lawyering and the use of incentivized and potentially false witness testimony — or, more generally, “snitch” testimony — are especially prominent problems. The Northwestern Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions found in 2005 that false testimony was the leading cause of known wrongful convictions during the current era of the death penalty. False testimony was implicated in nearly half the 111 death row exonerations at that time. A 2010 study undertaken by the Innocence Project revealed that deficient lawyering was a factor in 20 percent of 255 DNA exonerations. To date, 154 death row inmates have been exonerated, and a total of 330 people have been exonerated by DNA evidence.
As is often the case, these issues work together to make a wrongful conviction much more likely. When a defendant has a lousy lawyer, then problematic evidence or testimony, such as Sneed’s self-serving recitations, are far less likely to face true adversarial testing. “Because when you look at what goes wrong in these cases — eyewitness identification, prosecutorial misconduct, forensic error, you know, all these different things — if you had a good and zealous defense attorney then you could rectify these problems; you could catch them,” says Daniel Medwed, a professor of law at Northeastern University whose research focuses on wrongful convictions. “So it goes hand-in-glove: Every kind of government error to some extent is compounded by defense attorney error.”
There was no physical evidence linking Glossip to the crime.
Then there is the problem of what qualifies as corroboration. Even after two convictions, it is unclear what evidence exists, exactly, that corroborates Sneed’s account of the crime. Under Oklahoma law — theoretically, anyway — the testimony of an alleged accomplice must be corroborated by something that would connect the defendant to the crime itself — and not something that would merely corroborate that the crime happened. So, for example, if Sneed had said that Glossip took Van Treese’s wallet off of him after his death and that wallet was subsequently discovered in Glossip’s possession, that would certainly provide a measure of corroboration. That didn’t happen.
Requiring corroboration, however, is not a cure-all for the problem of highly charged incentivized testimony. When the courts consider nearly anything at all as corroborative, there is thus no meaningful standard — flawed forensics, for example, could be corroborative yet false. Or you could simply have some bare thread of circumstantial corroboration — a speculative connection, even — that, absent a meaningful standard, could be used to convict, and even to send someone to death row. Indeed, in Oklahoma, mere suspicion and fleeting connection is apparently enough corroboration to condemn a defendant to death.
To date, ten people have been exonerated from Oklahoma’s death row. Bad lawyering or questionable snitch testimony — and in some cases, both — have played a role in a number of these cases. Oklahoma’s first death row exoneree, Charles Ray Giddens, was sentenced to die for the killing of a grocery store clerk based on the uncorroborated account of an alleged accomplice, Johnnie Gray. An all-white jury deliberated 15 minutes before sending Giddens, who is black, to death row. Gray was never indicted for the murder. Giddens was cleared in 1981.
Better known, perhaps, is the 1982 case of Ronald Williamson (made famous by writer John Grisham in his book The Innocent Man), a former minor league baseball player who was sentenced to die for a rape-murder based on the account of a man named Glen Gore. Williamson’s conviction was ultimately overturned because of the ineffective assistance of his defense counsel. The lawyer was paid just $3,200 to defend Williamson. Ultimately, DNA connected Gore to the crime, and Williamson was finally exonerated in 1999.
In all, four of Oklahoma’s ten death row exonerations involved false snitch testimony, and in two cases the courts found ineffective lawyering, ratios that roughly match those found in the national studies.
AS HE AWAITS his fate today, Glossip admits that he made mistakes back in January 1997. He says he should not have ignored Sneed’s claims outside his apartment that morning. He especially regrets not telling the police about the exchange when he was first questioned the next day. Indeed, the police initially charged Glossip only with Accessory After the Fact, which his lawyers say was the only appropriate charge.
But Glossip continues to insist that he had nothing to do with Van Treese’s murder. He also describes an unsettling incident that points to Sneed, which he did not mention when he took the stand in 1998. Glossip says that the last time Van Treese was in Oklahoma City, roughly a month before he was murdered, Van Treese told Glossip that he’d awoken one morning to find Sneed standing in his room, staring at him. He said that Sneed quickly left. Glossip says he found this unnerving and suggested firing Sneed. Van Treese, he says, waved off the suggestion.
Perhaps most obvious of all, Glossip points out that there was simply no reason for him to commit murder. If he wanted money, he could have simply robbed Van Treese. After all, Glossip regularly handled and stored large amounts of cash for long periods of time before Van Treese came to collect. If he’d wanted to, Glossip said he simply could’ve walked out the door with the cash and never looked back.
As for wanting to keep his position at the Best Budget Inn, Glossip says he was never that desperate. “I can get a job,” Glossip told the prosecutor when taking the stand in 1998. “I wouldn’t hurt nobody for a job, ma’am. It isn’t worth it.”
Photo: 2007 Google Maps
Here is a doctor in Edinburgh who assists with suicide, and has found a chemical compound that is at once legal and non-violent.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/edinburgh-festival/dr-deaths-edinburgh-fringe-show-will-see-righttodie-campaigner-gas-audience-members-10405392.html
The “ethical wrestling match” conducted by the Supreme Court was pure theatrics then, as contracts for Big Pharma mean more than anything humane.
In 1994, Justice Antonin Scalia declined to find the death penalty unconstitutional and chose to support that view with recourse to an especially heinous murder:
But there is this one little thing:
Not that this will make a wit of difference to bloodthirsty authoritarians like Scalia, or our resident depraved racist, Lou Marin. “Kill ’em all, and let God sort ’em out,” right fellas?
In the U.S. “justice” system, actual innocence is not a ground for exoneration, or even a hearing.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2015/03/innocence_is_not_cause_for_exoneration_scalia_s_embarrassing_question_is.html
I assume everyone understands the reasoning behind this stuff is. If not, then you need to start thinking how glorious it must be, to be corrupt and kill people that are innocent. If anyone ever looked up Luceferian philosophy, then put that template over ANY politician, judge, DA, policeman, that is corrupt, and you will know why things are the way they are. Its about killing someone that makes you FEEL uncomfortable, like a black child, a christian church (with somone other than white in it ), or an innocent person that you dont know and dont care about. Sorry this is not written as succinct as normal, but you get the point.
I’d like to know if anyone has actually knowledge of this case. It seems everyone is forming opinions about whether this man is innocent or not based solely on his word. He did go to trial. So it’s not like he was found guilty on a whim. It wasn’t just on “Justin’s word,” as they claim. The justice system does not work that way. For those of you who oppose the death penalty because of moral or religious beliefs, I may not agree with you, but I have great respect for that.
Most of the commenters here are naïve leftist loons, and ‘facts’ rarely enter into their thought process. It’s their agenda that matters most to them, and they use any means and poor examples to that end.
Glossip is obviously as guilty as they come, and a fitting penalty for both him and Sneed would be a drawn-out beating by baseball-wielding family members of the murder victim…
I dont really know what to say to that. He’s my brother-in-law and I love him. But I do believe the fate they are living with is the fate they brought upon themselves.
Very curious that you would express your ‘love’ for a selfish and brutal murdering brother-in-law, yet express nothing at all for the brutally-murdered innocent victim and his grieving loved-ones.
What is there to find curious? We weren’t talking about the Van Treese family. We were discussing the murder/murderers/trial. Maybe you should ask yourself why you found the need to “call me out” on that, instead of just asking a question. I’ve been nothing but upfront. Maybe you’re motives aren’t as pure at you’d like them to be, acting as though you speak for the victim and his family.
I am not ‘acting like I’m speaking for the victim’s family’, I am expressing my empathy for them – and your lack of it. When agenda-driven articles such as this one, (Liliana’s bizarre specialty), focus solely on the ‘victimization’ of the poor little convicted murderers, my thoughts and concerns are for the real victims and their families. I do not care at all for the fairly and rightly convicted murderers and their well-deserved fate.
I never even knew who she was before this. I dont agree with most (ANY if I’m being honest) of the things I’ve read by her. But she’s entitled to her opinion, whether I agree with it or not. As for her ethics, or lack there-of… She’s the one that has to live with herself and her conscience.
No, you are simply manifesting your moral retardation. Torturing someone and killing them does not help the families of victims. It merely turns us into people who torture other people and kill them. As that well-known “leftist loon” put it:
I understand and can empathise with your loyalty to your brother-in-law. But I’d ask if it weren’t possible that your personal connection to the case might not also make you take sides with your brother-in-law because he is ‘your peoples’? Is it fair to accept one person’s *word* over another person’s *word* in a court case? While I wouldn’t want to see your brother-in-law killed by the state no matter how guilty he was, what I have a difficult time with is him basically foisting the death penalty upon somebody else. I guess my question for you, if you’re willing to answer it, is: What reasons, other than emotional reasons and desires for him not to be the (most) guilty party, do you have for believing he told the truth? He demonstrated quite well his capacity to lie (and thieve). To me that generally calls for questioning integrity — or at least not accepting the word of such a person on blind faith. If you have evidence or proof other than emotional cause, I am *more* than happy to hear about it.
I don’t know if you’ve seen my comments elsewhere but I’m against overzealous prosecution in general. That actually includes many cases of life imprisonment, not just the death penalty.
I guess I’m asking why you believe he didn’t commit perjury, when committing perjury is what most rational (guilty or not) people would do if it meant saving their lives? Would he have testified had he NOT gotten a deal with the prosecutors? Is it fair, in your opinion, for people to get less of a penalty for fingering somebody else, on principle, even if they are the ones who committed the crime?
I did not read that you believed your brother-in-law himself was not guilty, and (as someone with a legal education) I also have not seen anything suggesting material evidence in any case but your brother-in-laws. But I am reasonable and I really am welcome to hearing the other side of this story.
I’m sorry. And no, I dont mind answering, But I’m trying to understand what you’re asking, and I dont really know if I do.
The facts have nothing to do with emotions. I dont think emotions have any ground here. Justin is in prison for murder. Richard Glossip is on death row for murder. I’m not the one that had any part, or any say, in the sentences they received. That lies purely on the system, the court, the jury. Justin and Glossip share the guilt in this case. They are both the reason a man’s life was taken from him. They both should have been arrested, tried for murder, convicted and sentenced…And they were. Whether or not we agree with what they received, only matters to us. In my understanding, the grievance you have is with what they each received…? Or am I misunderstanding that?
As for the question on perjury: All anyone can go by is what was testified to in court and by what the jury/judge/system ultimately concluded. And the decision they reached was that they were both guilty. My original post was just a comment on the fact is seems everyone is quick to jump on any theory out there without having any proof to stand beside it. When it comes down to it, the only proof we have is any and all proof provided by the court. And they’ve had their say. On many different occasions.
“I guess I’m asking why you believe he didn’t commit perjury, when committing perjury is what most rational (guilty or not) people would do if it meant saving their lives?” ——- I completely understand what you’re asking. And my response to that is, it is very easy to believe Justin, in the position that he was/is in could have lied to save himself. It’s just as easy to believe that Glossip, in the position he was and is in now, could be lying to save himself as well. I think we can both agree on that.
Which is why it should be illegal — as it is for everyone else to offer people like Justin a thing of value — in this case his life– in exchange for a very particular kind of testimony. Only testimony that the cops and DAs like — if they don’t like what the person says, the needle goes back on the table.
This is inherently corrupt and unjust. It should not be allowed in a decent system.
Thanks for your time/response. Hopefully you’ll come back around tomorrow to check for a ‘real’ reply; I’d like to work through your response thoroughly but I’m on my way out the door.
One thing I do want to comment on now, though: “And my response to that is, it is very easy to believe Justin, in the position that he was/is in could have lied to save himself. It’s just as easy to believe that Glossip, in the position he was and is in now, could be lying to save himself as well. I think we can both agree on that.”
Whether or not Glossip is lying or not is actually irrelevant according to the strictures of the law; the law states ‘innocent until proven guilty’. Proof of guilt can not come merely from the word of another (certainly not the word of another with blood on their hands basically caught flat-out in the act and guaranteed leniency for testifying).
I find a lot of people seem to have faith in ‘the justice system’ always coming to a fair conclusion, but the truth of the matter is that it rarely does — and some of that is borne out in the sheer quantity of ‘guilty’ pleas that people often take despite being innocent, or even guilty of lesser charges — and many of those ‘plea bargains’ are signed because someone said something to someone else in order to lower or drop their own charges, and to avoid spending years in prison awaiting a trial with totally inept ‘counsel’. That’s not justice, and nor is assuming the justice system is infallible or without its built-in prejudices. Juries in general believe that prosecutors won’t put people on the stand who are lying. But prosecutors aren’t bound by those expectations (in theory they’re only bound by them if they ‘know’ the testifier is lying, and even then, it’s almost impossible to try to prove that’s the case when it is).
“They are both the reason a man’s life was taken from him. They both should have been arrested, tried for murder, convicted and sentenced…And they were. Whether or not we agree with what they received, only matters to us. In my understanding, the grievance you have is with what they each received…? Or am I misunderstanding that?”
You’re misunderstanding me. I’m saying that as far as I can tell there was no just reason to convict Glossip of the crime in the first place without specific evidence proving he’s guilty. As far as I know there wasn’t even strong *circumstantial* evidence that Glossip was guilty. It’s a mockery of the justice system to treat cases, especially death row cases, with the same burden of proof that is granted to arguments between siblings (he-said-she-said); in sibling cases, you often, actually, have a better chance of finding out who’s lying.
The burden of proof is always supposed to be placed on the prosecutor. The burden of ‘innocence’ isn’t meant to be put on the defendant — the defendant is meant to be innocent until *proven* guilty. Someone saying someone’s guilty isn’t proof. Especially someone who stands to benefit from that statement.
You however seem to believe Glossip is guilty and Sneed is guilty — mostly because Sneed said Glossip was guilty and a jury was probably horrified, bored or tricked into ignoring due process. I’d be more persuaded you weren’t speaking from your emotions if you were to say Sneed were guilty and Glossip *might* be guilty. The Truth isn’t decided on by a jury — only verdicts are. Verdicts can be wrong.
Incidentally, I forgot to say thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to converse with you, and am appreciative of your openness, candor, and willingness to discuss this. I know it’s personal and probably difficult (not just the discussion, but the case itself and its impact on you and your families).
Thank you. It is. I can’t imagine what pain the Van Treese family is going through. But the honest truth is that we’re in pain too. Just like Glossip’s family members are. We’ve all lost a part of ourselves in the family members that aren’t with us. None of us asked to be in the situation we are in. Everyone’s so quick to jump on the “well he killed someone” bandwagon. Well, yeah, HE [they] did. WE didnt. And this hurts. We dont hurt more or less than Van Treese’s family, we just hurt differently.
Honestly, trying to have a rational discussion with anyone proved to be more difficult than I thought. Naive little me. But I appreciate your taking the time to think things through, and ask questions, answer questions. Have a proper conversation.
As for everything you said, oh I agree. The justice system proves itself to be anything BUT at times. I dont mean to make things sound like they are cut and dry, they’re not. But for my own sanity, and it’s taken a very long time to reach that point, I’ve tried to accept things for what they are. There isn’t anywhere else for us to go. Justin’s life is decided. We can only be there for him as much as we can. We’re in an entirely different position than Glossip’s.
Hi. I’m wondering, You said you have a legal education. In what aspect?
I understand the need to try to make sense of things as best as you know how (although (and I hope this doesn’t seem rude) you might want to consider that you might be rationalising more than is healthy or beneficial to anybody — including yourself). I’m sure it probably feels more like a betrayal and misplaced blame as well, not just a loss.
One of my biggest issues with the justice system is that it doesn’t just outsizedly punish offenders — it also punishes their families, friends, and community — and does so in such a way that often the only way to cope is to rationalise, walk away, deny, or disown. It creates more problems than it solves. But the problems and solutions are so intertwined that what might seem like small acts can have big consequences (for those inside, for those outside).
I’m not sure it’s fair to say your family hurts as much as the Van Treese family (or the Glossip family), but I say that without malice, and I hope you’ll hear me out, here: You don’t know what they feel, and they don’t know what you feel (and I don’t know how any of you feel — I can only take what I know and make reasonably educated guesses). It’s probably qualitatively different and not really comparable, but it must also be quantitatively different; Van Treese is dead, your brother in law is not (and there’s questions as to whether he’s not on death row because of something he said that will wind up causing someone else to die), and Glossip likely will die (unless your brother-in-law were to recant or the case were tossed out or the sentence commuted). I’d venture that makes the Glossips’ pain also qualitatively and quantitatively different. That doesn’t mean your pain doesn’t matter. It just means it’s extraordinarily difficult to hope for sympathy from people who see you as sympathising with the people who have ruined their lives — ie, it’s not that you DID something. It’s that you’re not turning your back on the person that did something to someone they care about.
There’s a chance your brother-in-law told the truth, or that he lied, but there’s no evidence, either way; Glossip, though, is on a clock and his integrity is totally at question; there’s not much he can do but keep banging the same nail and repeating: No evidence, no evidence, no evidence; Is there a reasonable way to act in that situation? Either way, shouldn’t both mens’ integrity be equally in question if it’s a matter of one man’s word against the other’s, with the price being death?
There’s another issue, perhaps subtler: The Van Treeses will likely never know exactly what happened due to that lack of material evidence. Glossip may never be believed regardless of what he says but nor can he be entirely disbelieved without that evidence — so even if his case should get tossed, there’s an added cost to the Van Treeses psychologically: By testifying, your brother-in-law created a narrative that will always raise questions, absent real evidence — *regardless* of if he lied or told the truth, the Van Treeses will never be *sure* what the truth is — something that a proper investigation with evidence and no tomfoolery or tricky deals would far more likely be capable of offering.
Your closure will come but Glossip’s family’s probably never will, especially if the death penalty gets carried out. You/yours can visit your brother-in-law. The Glossips lack the same long-term opportunity on any guaranteed basis. They’re stuck grieving in cycles. Your family knows its status quo. They’re on a rollercoaster (and death row cases aren’t cheap, easy on time, or fun from what I hear). That rollercoaster of the unknown tends to be far more stressful than coping with having someone be in prison, even with a life sentence.
I’m sorry if I sound cold and/or presumptuous. I’m trying to be honest and blunt with you because I suspect most people you know in person can’t or won’t be. If I’ve overstepped, I apologise. I know I’m a stranger.
That said, it sounds like you haven’t found anybody to discuss these issues with — that you’re pushing this stuff down while telling yourself you’re coping — and that’s not healthy. If you can’t afford a good therapist (someone with grief and/or trauma counseling experience might be helpful if you can’t get somebody with more specific experience) I highly suggest that you find a good support group local to you for families of people in prison who are dealing with the same issues; some of the reentry programs local to you will likely have a list of resources for these groups. I could suggest a couple of online support resources but I’d be hesitant to do so on here — it’d be better for you to find them organically and away from here; they’re not hard to find, though.
A wee bit presumptuous, I’d say :) yes. But I dont fault you for that.
I’m pretty sure I never said my family hurts “as much as” the Van Treese family. We hurt in a different way. And for the exact reasons you mentioned. They are completely different. I read what I wrote and tried to see it the way you seem to have taken it and I’m sorry but I just dont. Esp considering I agree with most, if not all, of what you said. So I’m a bit lost with your take on what I wrote, I’m afraid. So honestly, I dont know what to say to any of that. I think to clarify what I feel or the way I see things would only be accomplished by spilling way more than I’m willing on a public forum to people I dont know. I stuck to the basic jist of things, maybe that’s why it was taken in a different way than i meant…??? Idk. Either way, I can appreciate your… interest?…in my well-being. I’m kind of at a loss there too, it’s very considerate of you :) Honestly, if I hadn’t read all your previous posts I would have taken what you wrote as patronizing and condescending. But I feel that that was not your intention. It’s hard to gauge someone’s true intent through typed words, yeah? :) Either way, I’ve appreciated the discussion
Apologies if I came across as harsh. I was tired and I did reread what I wrote more than once and triple-checked your comment. It may be I just didn’t read it the way you meant it to have been written, and if so I apologise. Your original commented stated “And this hurts. We dont hurt more or less than Van Treese’s family, we just hurt differently.”
Commenting on the rest separately.
” think to clarify what I feel or the way I see things would only be accomplished by spilling way more than I’m willing on a public forum to people I dont know. I stuck to the basic jist of things, maybe that’s why it was taken in a different way than i meant…??? ”
I suspect so. You’re not the first person I’ve come across or known (I won’t say we know one another — we don’t) who has dealt with the issues you’re going through. Most of the issues are pretty common and I don’t believe I was being presumptuous when I addressed those. I specifically tried to avoid making direct, specific assumptions to your case on anything than the most superficial level for this reason. Honestly it’s none of my business and I do acknowledge your pain as profound and specific to you. That’s one reason I suggested you find a support group local to you (and try not to use one online). Honestly I feel more for you than I do for your sister-in-law from some of what I read because people in your situation (you’re a sister-in-law, not even related?) probably get the most unnecessary taint for the least possible affiliation and I know that people love to gawk. I wish you the best and am grateful for the chance to talk with you. Do please try to find a local support group though. I tried to walk a line between ‘professional’ and ‘random person on the net’ and it was a difficult one to walk. Sometimes I don’t do that as well as I’d like.
I fudged this thanks to the new commenting system, please read “feel more for you than I do for your sister-in-law” as “feel more for you than I do his (Justin Sneed’s) more immediate family”. I just wanted to reply to you before I get off of this site; it was sloppy. The commenting system is giving me a headache.
Lol. Ditto. I’m out as well. Thanks for the conversation
Oh, yes, it certainly does. https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/09/oklahoma-prepares-resume-executions-richard-glossip-first-line-die/#comment-147141
And because I knew I was going to reply to your comment, Mona — agreed, it happens like this/that OFTEN. Part of the problem is people thinking it doesn’t.
Just in case you might not see my reply easily (it’s nested) I wanted to ask you to look for it in this comment thread, please.
Thanks for your time.
Is that request directed at me?
No, Mona, sorry — to Sandra Sneed.
I’m sorry that Glossip lost the Supreme Court Case. It seems to me that an innocent man should be able to choose a less brutal form of execution. However, that is not the law of the land, and he will be forced to suffer an excruciatingly painful death, while paralyzed so that the spectators don’t see his discomfort.
At least he won’t be put to death in one of those backward and uncivilized foreign countries.
Who is the “innocent man” you reference?
In the legal system, the accused is considered innocent until a witness is offered a deal by the prosecutor in exchange for committing perjury.
However, I’m not a lawyer, so I’m free to use my own definition.
:D
If this is a murder for hire, and the money FOUND in the car was used to pay for the murder for hire, why isn’t the $24,100.00 dollars found in the trunk of Barry Van Tresse’s car NOT SOMEHOW RELEVANT???? Why didn’t Liliana tell us about that when the lawyer offered that evidence to her in a telephone interview???? That is what is disturbing!!!!
It did not fit her agenda.
A new, cripplingly dull, group of trolls enters the fray. I think someone couldn’t afford to spring for one of the fancier, more nimble-witted troll factories.
Sumac.
I have tried to help you, Liliana but you have taken the evidence I offered and trashed it. I am through with talking to you and I am tired of having to spoon feed you the truth and evidence of Richard Glossip’s innocence while my wife is sick and needs me helping her instead. Go fuck yourself, Liliana.
O/T but I wanted to say I hope your wife improves.
“Please spare us from your blathering on, insider-outsider, expose, heroism bullshit.”
My opposition to the death penalty is not limited to the innocent. For every Troy Davis or Richard Glossip there are less apparently innocent, but still human beings. No death penalty. Period.
Among the many huge flaws in the American criminal “justice” system is that prosecutors alone among the rest of the citizenry — including defense attorneys — may offer benefits and things of value in exchange for testimony. That is, they may bribe witnesses. This leads to many wrongful convictions. The 10th Circuit ruled this illegal in 1998 — thus holding prosecutors to the same rules on bribing witnesses that apply to everyone else.
The defense bar went crazy, as did the Department of Justice. There was, shall we say, pressure brought to bear. With the result being what I bold below:
Well hell, this sentence is wrong: “The defense bar went crazy, as did the Department of Justice.” It should read: Prosecutors state and federal, as well as the Department of Justice, went crazy.” They didn’t like it one bit.
“THERE WAS NO PHYSICAL EVIDENCE LINKING GLOSSIP TO THE CRIME.” Fact or fiction? If true, the verdict and subsequent sentence “in this instant case” ought to be overturned, imho.
Two items convince me that Glossip was at least an accessory to Van Treese’s murder: Glossip didn’t check on Van Treese after Glossip and Wood were awoken by frighteningly loud pounding and scraping noise coming from Van Treese’s room next door; Glossip didn’t notice that Van Treese’s room was covered in blood when Glossip and Sneed repaired Van Treese’s window. (Also, I can’t believe that Glossip wouldn’t have checked on Van Treese’s room more thoroughly after learning that it’s window was broken and Van Treese’s car was gone.) However, in a court of law, I agree with the authors that there isn’t any corroborated evidence to support my belief, making a murder conviction unsupportable. Finally, I don’t support the death penalty because the mistake of killing an innocent person cannot be fixed.
“He also describes an unsettling incident that points to Sneed, which he did not mention when he took the stand in 1998.”
Really? How fucking convenient to ‘remember’ this after his trial. GUILTY.
BOTH of these guys deserve to die in agony – just like their victim…
You are a sick and depraved authoritarian racist. That “karma” comment you made to one of Juan Thompson’s articles is all one needs to know about the foul man named Lou Marin.
Your repetitive stalking psychotic replies to my valid comments are getting old and tired, and do not intimidate me. Save your alcohol-tinged breath for those who revere your sorry ass…
You think black people don’t deserve police protection, that if they are murdered by criminals this is just “karma.”
As I said, you are an authoritarian racist, and quite a depraved one.
You are far too kind, Mona.
Trying to make up for the hit piece on Adnan? Pretty much same scenario here except Jay never admitted to killing Hae.
The authors of this superb piece of investigative journalism had nothing at all to do with the Adnan/Serial articles. Those were written by Natasha Vargas Cooper who left The Intercept some time ago.
[O/T but never was I happier to see a ‘journalist’ booted from here.]
I will simply say that eventually I was not a fan.
Welcome to Oklahoma! These executions are about the ONLY cases Pruitt has won while being the AG. Oklahoma is become more and more fundamental, this is just another symptom of how morally corrupt the state is becoming. Refusing to abide by our own Constitution, suing other states over their legalized marijuana, purging AP History and replacing it with prayers and speeches by Regan and Bush, senators handing out Bibles in public schools…if Fallin and crew could get away with it Oklahoma would become the Afghanistan of the US, and home of the Christian Taliban.
They can pass out all the Bibles they want, but if it doesn’t repulse them to even think of an innocent man being brutally, terribly killed based on the word of the brutal killer, then I think they need to read them again. And make it past the first five chapters, I mean.
Murder rates are highest in those states that carry out state-sponsored murder. Kind of gives a whole new angle to the phrase ‘What goes around, comes around’.
The fact is that teaching people that violence is a solution only breeds more violence.
Read on:
‘States in the United States that do not employ the death penalty generally have lower murder rates than states that do.’
‘In the US, research shows that homicide actually increases on either side of an execution. Social scientists refer to this as the “brutalization effect”:
‘Executions desensitize the public to the immorality of killing, increasing the probability that some people will be motivated to kill;
The state legitimizes the notion that vengeance for past misdeeds is acceptable;
Executions also have an “imitation effect” in which people follow the state’s example. If people feel the government can kill its enemies, they believe they can too – Bowers and Pierce, 1980; King, 1978, Forst. 1983.’ http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/27/capital-punishment-wrongful-conviction
I’ve always said that, but it’s beautiful that you CITED SOURCES. I looked up that list of citations and found all cited with titles and further detail at http://www.e-archives.ky.gov/pubs/Public_Adv/nov97/crime_control.htm , from which they can be researched further.
As far as I’m concerned, any society that snuffs out the lives of it’s own citizens in the name of ‘justice’ does not exist on a higher footing than that of emotional responses, and violent impulses.
Such a society sees violence and death as solutions to it’s problems. And what society created these problems in the first place? Do murderers and rapists evolve independently of the World around them? Is society perfectly good, and a criminal perfectly evil? I doubt anyone could be so arrogant as to answer yes to either of the above.
Should society respond to it’s sickness with more sickness? Or should society exist on a level removed from such primitive feelings of violence and revenge? Isn’t the test of any civilized society the ability to maintain and adhere to a strict moral code in the face of the worst kinds of sadism and barbarity?
From ‘Reflections on The Guillotine’ by Albert Camus:
“Whoever has done me harm must suffer harm; whoever has put out my eye must lose an eye; and whoever has killed must die. This is an emotion, and a particularly violent one, not a principle. Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature. If murder is in the nature of man, the law is not intended to imitate or reproduce that nature. It is intended to correct it. Now, retaliation does no more than ratify and confer the status of a law on a pure impulse of nature.’
‘But, let me repeat, I do not believe, nonetheless, that there is no responsibility in this world and that we must give way to that modern tendency to absolve everything, victim and murderer, in the same confusion. Such purely sentimental confusion is made up of cowardice rather than of generosity and eventually justifies whatever is worst in this world….To any who feel, on the other hand, that hard labor is too mild a penalty, we can answer first that they lack imagination, and secondly, that privation of freedom seems to them a slight punishment only insofar as contemporary society has taught us to despise freedom.’
“Could not justice concede to the criminal the same weakness in which society finds a sort of permanent extenuating circumstance for itself? Can the jury decently say: “If I kill you by mistake, you will forgive me when you consider the weaknesses of our common nature. But I am condemning you to death without considering those weaknesses or that nature”? There is a solidarity of ill men in error and aberration. Must that solidarity operate for the tribunal and be denied the accused? No, and if justice has any meaning in this world, it means nothing but the recognition of that solidarity; it cannot, by its very essence, divorce itself from compassion. Compassion, of course, can in this instance be but awareness of a common suffering and not a frivolous indulgence paying no attention to the sufferings and rights of the victim. Compassion does not exclude punishment, but it suspends the final condemnation. Compassion loathes the definitive, irreparable measure that does an injustice to mankind as a whole because of failing to take into account the wretchedness of the common condition.” – Albert Camus ‘Reflections on the Guillotine’
From the comments above, I see many ppl still believe that the Americans are morally superior to the rest of the “Muslim” world and China and in America, it is only the leaders and the elite that have no values. It is worth noting that Americans have the privilege of choosing their leader once in every 5 years and hence, these leaders are, at least partially, your representative. Most of the Arabs in the world haven’t had that privilege. I don’t mean to say that the Arabs, Russians and Chinese (the worst people on American TV today. These could change depending on your foreign policy) are morally superior, but at least equal. All of them came through the same evolutionary process as Americans did.
It is very unfortunate that people club us together with China, ISIL, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and some more Muslim countries that like us continue to kill people in custody. Our method of killing is the most humane and least celebratory, though I admit I have my misgivings about the latter. Sometimes it gets botched, but that is not our fault. Many of the hardened criminals develop resistance to drugs during their incarceration where all types of drugs are freely available. So we mess up sometimes, but we try not to.
This particular case is ridiculous. The original defense lawyer was either incompetent or complicit in this defendant getting a guilty verdict, and probably the judge was snoozing during the trial. It is the duty of the prosecution to deliver justice to the victim and to society, and not just deliver punishment to whoever that can be grasped.
“It is very unfortunate that people club us together with China, ISIL, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and some more Muslim countries that like us continue to kill people in custody. Our method of killing is the most humane and least celebratory, though I admit I have my misgivings about the latter. Sometimes it gets botched, but that is not our fault.”
You are so delusional.
All our claims to being exceptional, morally superior, and a beacon of liberty and justice are simply claims, which, when compared to the evidence as demonstrated by our contempories in the rest of the “civilized democracies” should be held in contempt. I do.
This is absolutely horrifying.
The only evidence being used against this man, is the testimony of the actual murderer, claiming this guy TOLD him to do it, in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table in HIS case… and the fact that this man didn’t inform the police of the murder’s comment, even though at the time he didn’t know if there had been in fact a murder at all?
And THAT is enough to get this man put to death?
Talk about the justice system being a run away train going off the tracks… this is insanity.
That’s correct. There is no good reason to believe Glossip said anything to the actual murderer.
Moreover the accusations have not been consistent and changed over time.
I have been campaigning in a small way on this case since Jaunary.
A petition has attracted over 40 thousand signatures.
It is quite obvious from the facts presented that those responsible for this heinous murder have been convicted.
The only problem I have with the outcome is that Sneed will not see the same well-deserved punishment as Gossip…
Reasonable doubt means nothing to you. Ever served on a jury?
Go and watch 12 angry men https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_Angry_Men_%281957_film%29
The real “twelve angry men” are twelve men angry that they are getting paid a token sum daily, without compensation for lost work, who don’t want to hear somebody arguing any more, but just want to strike a majority vote so they can go home. All the rest is Hollywood.
I refer to the 1957 version which covers your first sentence. It took one man to get through to the eleven others the importance of reasonable doubt. I take your point that that rarely happens but I thought the film made the same point.
Okay, right after I get through beating your mother to death with a baseball bat…
My mother died from natural causes in 1993, but say you did what you want to, what is in your murderous nature, that is to kill, I would wish you a fair trial and time to repent in a safe and secure enviroment if you are found guilty.
Such as?
I further name Lou Marin as a co-conspiritor, if that’ll get me off death row. He’s guilty because I saw it on the Internet, and Lou himself said that was ‘quite obvious’ it was all true.
Did you even READ the article ? It shows nothing of the sort .
This system rewards convictions (and acquittals) regardless of guilt or innocence. Both sides try to “win” – and the truth doesn’t really matter.
It’s a hard system to fix. A cop friend of mine used to claim that 20% of people in prison were innocent.
This is the sort of case where any reasonably decent governor would take out his pen and commute the sentence. The Governor of the state of Oklahoma is the final check and balance on the death penalty in his state. Commute to life with possibility for parole.
I think the Governor of Oklahoma is Mary Fallin, a devout christian no doubt.
She’s so devout she doesn’t remember Romans 12:19 “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” She’s one of those Christians who only applies the “rules” to others but ignores them herself. She was REALLY pissed about marriage equality, and wants to impeach the OKSC judges who rules the 10 Commandments are a violation of the OK Constitution. If this guy had been a Big Oil corporation, he could have poisoned an entire town and gotten off scott-free.
According to some sources like http://www.newson6.com/story/29446696/death-row-inmate-richard-glossip-maintains-innocence-as-execution-looms the Oklahoma governor doesn’t even HAVE a pardon right, but can only grant a 60 day stay. Apparently some foresighted legislators wanted to be damned sure that no governor would use his discretion to end their ISIS-style entertainments. Nonetheless, the governor should grant that stay as many times as she’s allowed to; executive branch officials routinely abuse ’emergency’ powers, so imagine one did it in a real emergency with a life at stake.
So wait — there was no material evidence of any explicit wrongdoing and nothing but his own admission that he didn’t report things to the police and the word of someone who actually brutally committed murder and would have gotten the death penalty?
What jury thought this was a brilliant idea and that the death penalty should apply even if he were convicted?
As a side note, sometimes when I hear defendants’ names I can’t help but wonder if those names don’t occasionally act as semantic aids to conviction in and of themselves; in this case, ‘Glossip’ sounds like glop plus gossip. That’s not meant to the dft in any way — It’s meant to say that at a minimum I’m sure a lot of people in that courtroom made a subliminal connection between his character and at least the word ‘gossip’. ‘Sneed’ is no winner either.
I left out that I agree with the assessment that Accessory After the Fact would have been an appropriate charge, lacking explicit material evidence of anything more.
This whole ‘testify and get a reward’ and ‘testify and get a reward and you don’t die’ is especially disturbing when it’s used to get the ‘witness’, who is the perpetrator, a lighter sentence than death, and pass that death penalty on to someone else. Assuming this guy knows how to game the system (and I get the idea that he does), he wouldn’t have needed nudging to come up with his story.
I was thinking manslaughter, but conspiracy to commit murder seems more appropriate. Although, that is also a capital offense in Oklahoma I think.
So you think that’s appropriate with literally no material evidence and only the word of someone who’d get the death penalty (and obviously wouldn’t want it) and the fact that he was negligent in reporting the (rather brutal) murder (with money!)?
Just to clarify so I know who to say ordered me to do something some time down the line when I take the stand so I get off easy.
Well said.
+Useful Idiots Yes. Well said. I was Richard Glossip’s first trial lawyer and Richard Glossip is innocent!
After the fact involvement does not yet one the death penalty under the then current Oklahoma law (and it may still be that way, I don’t know). Richard Glossip is on death row because of allegedly masterminding the murder. Title 22 O.S. Section 701 (Aforethought Murder) was the only charge he faced and if he had been convicted of After the Fact involvement only, he would have been released 7 years ago.
Hi, thanks for your comment(s).
I’m not sure if you’d be willing or able to answer this, but where would you say the case went wrong (leaving out the bizarre prosecutorial conduct including allowing/believing the testimony of Sneed (I see this all the time elsewhere)). I get the feeling someone was corrupt here — but I admittedly don’t know Oklahoma statutes nor the judges there, nor what the purpose of swaying the case would be (did someone really want/need a win?).
Near as I can tell things failed at the investigatory stage, then the prosecutorial stage, and then (finally) with the judge who should have reined this in. And now again. But I must be missing something? Maybe not something pointing to culpability, but something which helped the railroading occur?
Again, if you cannot reply to this in detail, I’d (obviously) fully understand.
As an attorney and citizen it is indisputable our criminal justice system is flawed. So it blows my mind anyone could support the death penalty. That’s notwithstanding the idea that I find it morally repugnant and indefensible in the first instance, but I understand there are many whose “moral” code is not the same as mine. You’d think the simple reality, and fact, that there is a risk that even one innocent person could be put to death should be enough for every person to reject such a punishment out of hand. But not in America. Sad. We are about as far from being a “civilized” nation as is Saudi Arabia. Never surprises me our elites choose to have the Saudis as one of their closest allies. I’m always a little surprised the Supreme Court as currently constituted doesn’t approve of beheadings in the public square. Although I don’t find any one means of killing a human being any more or less “humane” than any other. Dead is dead and the innocent don’t give a hoot whether you did it by firing squad, hanging, lethal injection or electrocution because all are barbaric and you’re still just as dead. Truly sickens me that the supposed “greatest nation on earth” and “most exceptional people” still resort to this mockery of “justice.”
God will explain it all to you someday.
And whose god is that?
I think (hope?) his comment was meant to be sarcastic.
I cannot imagine being falsely imprisoned and put to death for a crime I did not commit. Even the supposed reason for the murder (i.e., we’ll get kicked out of the hotel if we don’t kill him) doesn’t make sense as when an owner’s death would logically lead to job loss for at least the forseeable future and possibly permanently if the motel closed or if the new owner chose to hire another person.
I understand from interviews with members of the Angola 3 that their sanity was maintained in part because they understood that they were in solitary facing death row for their prison activism. Knowing you are being persecuted is not as Kafkaesque as being prosecuted when you know you are innocent, especially if you are poor and trusting, or resigned to whatever comes.
+Moomoo Thank you!! You noticed that too. I was Richard Glossip’s first trial lawyer and Richard Glossip is innocent of the death penalty charge. He did not mastermind or plot the killing of Barry Van Treese.
Which god? There are over 7000 known gods.
Whether you somehow trust that a god will deliver your soul or not, anyone sane wants that day to be far off, not next week, nor on the word of the actual killer!
I’m guessing he means Apasm?ra, the Hindu god of ignorance.
Of course the royal mindf*ck would be if all of them were real.
Thank you for your comment. I was Richard’s first trial lawyer. I know for a fact Richard is innocent.