Richard Glossip was convicted and sentenced to death for being a party to the January 6, 1997, murder of an Oklahoma City motel owner. The murder was carried out by a violent 19-year-old “meth” addict named Justin Sneed, who beat the owner, Barry Van Treese, to death with a baseball bat. Sneed would later implicate Glossip, who managed the motel for Van Treese, saying he commissioned him to commit the murder. Glossip not only denied any involvement but any knowledge about the Van Treese murder.
Over the next nearly three decades, Glossip received not only massive media attention for his innocence claim but also a new trial after his initial conviction was reversed by an Oklahoma appeals court for ineffective assistance of counsel. He was retried, convicted, and again sentenced to death. He then mounted a series of post-conviction pleadings pursuing his innocence claim while discovering significant prosecutorial misconduct—all of which questioned his guilt and made his claim of innocence exceedingly credible.
Glossip’s claim of innocence claim became so credible that it gained the attention of the entire Oklahoma Legislature, from which 62 bipartisan members assigned a prominent law firm, Reed Smith, to investigate the claim. That investigation would ultimately cast “grave doubt” on the integrity of Glossip’s conviction and death sentence, finding that the prosecution had destroyed key evidence before Glossip’s retrial—evidence that supported his innocence claim. The Reed Smith investigation prompted the prosecution to disclose eight boxes of evidence that left little doubt about Glossip’s claim of innocence—evidence of Brady violations and the knowing use by the prosecution of false testimony.
The Glossip case became a national focal point on the death penalty as it found its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Conservative Oklahoma and national Republican figures, as well as civil rights and anti-death penalty groups, filed amicus curiae briefs urging the Court to reverse Glossip’s conviction and set aside his death sentence.
On February 25, 2025, in an 82-page decision, the Supreme Court did precisely that, ruling that Glossip was entitled to a new trial. However, 43 of those pages was a meandering, often rambling dissenting opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas—joined in its entirety by fellow right-wing Justice Samuel Alito—that not only stretched but misrepresented Supreme Court precedents in a mean-spirited effort to reject Glossip’s claim of innocence, deny him a new trial, and allow the State of Oklahoma to get on with his execution.
Throughout his dissent, Thomas continuously belittled the majority opinion written by Justice Sandra Sotomayor, who correctly interpreted and applied court precedents to the horrendous facts about the prosecutorial misconduct engaged in by the Oklahoma prosecutor who secured the death penalty verdict against Glossip.
Justice Sotomayor closed the majority opinion with this observation:
“The dissent inverts this precedent, asserting that state courts should always have another opportunity to identify additional grounds for denying relief, even where this Court has found a federal constitutional violation. Yet there is no reason to allow state courts a second (or third, or fourth) bite at the apple to identify alternative state grounds for their decision in every case involving a dependent ground. The facts as conceded by the attorney general and supported by the record establish a [knowing use of false testimony] violation. And a new trial is the remedy for [such] a violation.”
A professional, well-written summation of the Court’s decision to reverse Glossip’s unconstitutional conviction—which the current Oklahoma attorney general supported—which Justice Thomas belittled in the opening paragraph of his dissent:
“Richard Glossip—a convicted murderer twice sentenced to death by Oklahoma juries—challenges the denial of his fifth application for state post-conviction relief. Although Glossip won the support of Oklahoma’s new attorney general, he failed to persuade either body with authority to grant him relief: The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals (OCCA) denied Glossip’s application as both procedurally deficient and nonmeritorious, and Oklahoma’s Pardon and Parole Board denied clemency. Because this Court lacks the power to override these denials, that should have marked the end of the road for Glossip. Instead, the Court stretches the law at every turn to rule in his favor. At the threshold, it concocts federal jurisdiction by misreading the decision below. On the merits, it finds a due process violation based on patently immaterial testimony about a witness’s medical condition. And, for the remedy, it orders a new trial in violation of black-letter law on this Court’s power to review state-court judgments.”
After stumbling about through the history of “black letter law” court precedents, about which he tugged and stretched through warped legal reasoning to avoid applying in Glossip’s case, Justice Thomas finally decided that it should be the vengeful interest of the crime victim’s family—the Van Treese family—that should determine whether Glossip should be given a new trial and spared an execution fate. The right-wing justice, joined by his “yes buddy” Alito, context the family issue this way:
“The ‘Government should turn square corners in dealing with the people.’ That command extends not only to criminal defendants but also to their victims. ‘C]onducting retrials years later inflicts substantial pain on crime victims,” who must “relive their trauma and testify again,’ in this case 28 ‘years after the crim[e] occurred.’ The Oklahoma Constitution recognizes this interest by giving crime victims like the Van Treese family the right—‘which shall be protected by law in a manner no less vigorous than the rights afforded to the accused’—‘to be heard in any proceeding involving release, plea, sentencing, disposition, parole and any proceeding during which a right of the victim is implicated.‘ Glossip, on the other hand, would suffer no prejudice from an evidentiary hearing in which the Van Treese family had the opportunity to present its case. If the evidence is as decisive as the majority believes, Glossip would still receive a new trial. There is no excuse for denying the Van Treese family its day in Court.
“After having bent the law at every turn to grant relief to Glossip, the Court suddenly retreats to faux formalism when dealing with the victim’s family. The Court concludes that it need not honor the family’s right to be heard because the family did not request an evidentiary hearing earlier in the proceedings. But, the family had no need to do so, since Glossip had conceded that ‘a hearing is necessary‘ for his claim to rise above the level of ‘speculation.‘ And, before this Court, the Van Treese family has vigorously asserted its interests. The family filed the only brief opposing certiorari in this case. It filed a merits brief highlighting critical evidence that the parties sought to sweep under the rug. And, it filed a motion to participate in oral argument, which this Court denied. The majority’s assertion that the family has sat on its rights is groundless. Nor is there any reason to believe that Oklahoma victims’ right to be heard in ‘any proceeding,‘ contains an implicit exception for ‘post-conviction hearings’… Finally, even if the family had no formal right to be heard, any reasonable factfinder plainly could consider the account of the evidence that the family has brought to light, making the majority’s procedural objections beside the point. Make no mistake: The majority is choosing to cast aside the family’s interests. I would not.”
Before ending his bizarre trek through a constitutional wilderness, Justice Thomas, to the satisfaction and glee of “yes buddy“ Alito, took this final jab at the majority opinion:
“The Court’s decision distorts our jurisdiction, imagines a constitutional violation where none occurred, and abandons basic principles governing the disposition of state-court appeals. I respectfully dissent.”
Fortunately, Thomas’ distorted view did not carry the day.
Fields marked with an * are required
"*" indicates required fields
Notifications