Oklahoma was going to execute Richard Glossip this afternoon for a murder he may not have committed.
The Oklahoma Court of Appeals
has granted Richard Glossip a two-week stay of execution. The 52-year-old inmate was scheduled for execution at 3 PM CT for the murder of his boss in 1997. He has always maintained his innocence and his lawyers presented the court with new evidence this week that he was framed.
While the stay is a victory for Glossip, his lawyers will still have a tough time getting him off death row.
If all the states had wised up and ended the barbaric practice of capital punishment, Glossip wouldn't have faced the prospect of a lethal injection this afternoon. But advocates of the death penalty say some people deserve to die. Consequently, 31 states still sanction executions. So far this year, five of them have drugged 20 convicted men to death.
One of those states is Oklahoma, which executed Charles Warner in January. If the court hadn't ruled as it did, Glossip would have become #21 despite a strong possibility that he is innocent. That possibility did not persuade Republican Gov. Mary Fallin to use her authority to grant a 60-day stay:
In her statement denying a temporary reprieve for Glossip, Gov. Fallin said the “new evidence” presented to her did not provide “credible evidence of Richard Glossip’s innocence.”
Describing Glossip’s attorneys claims of having new evidence as “part of a larger publicity campaign opposing the death penalty,” Fallin said she saw “no reason to cast doubt on the guilty verdict reached by the jury or to delay Glossip’s sentence of death.”
No surprise. Fallin's appalling willingness to go ahead last year with the executions of Clayton Lockett and Warner—to whom the Oklahoma Supreme Court had granted stays—pretty much tells you how far down she ranks on the mercy scale. After the state Supreme Court had issued their stays, the Republican-controlled Oklahoma legislature forced two of its gutless judges to change their minds under threats of impeachment. So give the appeals court judges credit for a small bit of courage.
Read more about this case below the fold.
In January, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against Glossip's lawyers' argument that the drug midazolam used as part of Oklahoma's lethal injection cocktail constituted cruel and unusual punishment. That case arose from the botched execution of Lockett, who took 43 minutes to die last year, and Warner, who said after he was injected eight months ago that he felt his "body is on fire" and "it feels like acid."
In two trials—the outcome of the first having been overturned on the grounds he had had inadequate counsel—Glossip was not convicted of having personally killed his boss at the motel where he worked but rather of having hired another man, motel handyman Justin Sneed, to do it. The only evidence against Glossip was Sneed's testimony. Sneed was given a plea deal that gave him a sentence of life without parole. But according to a letter written to authorities by Sneed's daughter last year, her father was ready to recant his testimony against Glossip. That hope faded when he decided not to do so for fear his plea agreement might be reneged and he would face the death penalty himself.
Glossip's lawyers said this week that an inmate in a cell across from Sneed's stated in a signed affidavit he heard the man often brag about how he had set up Glossip to keep from being executed. They also say a man who had sold meth to Sneed said in another affidavit that the handyman made a habit of breaking into motel rooms to steal money to buy drugs. “I saw nothing to make me think that Justin Sneed was controlled by Richard Glossip,” the dealer wrote. At a press conference, the lawyers gave journalists a report from an expert on false confessions who said that investigators manipulated Sneed in order to implicate Glossip. Sneed didn't at first tell them that Glossip was behind the murder, the expert said. It was rather they who suggested that idea to him.
Glossip's pending execution has generated heavy opposition, including nearly 300,000 signatures on a clemency petition and letters from prominent people seeking clemency or a stay of execution. Billionaire Richard Branson has made a personal plea as has Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project. Another was made to Gov. Fallinn by Tom Coburn, who was until recently a Republican senator from Oklahoma.
Someday, neither the innocent nor the guilty will be executed in the United States. But that will require relentless effort on the part of those of us who are determined to stop our leaders from carrying out a policy that is based on the reptile portion of our brains.