[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----OKLAHOMA

[Rick Halperin]

July 10



OKLAHOMA:

WHAT HAPPENED IN ROOM 102----Oklahoma Prepares to Execute Richard Glossip


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 3 men in line for the gurney - the same 3 
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 3 dates for the fall.

Richard Glossip is 1st 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."

Glossip has always maintained his innocence, ever since he was arrested in the 
winter of 1997 for a grisly killing that authorities prosecuted as a 
murder-for-hire. It is true that he himself did not kill anyone - a 19-year-old 
man named Justin Sneed confessed to police that he beat the victim to death 
with a baseball bat - but Glossip was identified as the "mastermind" behind the 
crime. Sneed, who worked for Glossip, claimed his boss pressured him to carry 
out the murder, offering him employment opportunities and several thousand 
dollars in return. There was very little additional evidence to back up his 
claims, but Sneed nevertheless was able to secure the state's conviction of 
Glossip, saving himself from death row. Today, Sneed is serving life without 
parole at a medium security prison in Lexington, Oklahoma. Meanwhile, Glossip 
faces execution, while continuing to insist he had nothing to do with the 
murder. Last January, he came within a day of being executed and was in the 
process of saying goodbye to family when the Supreme Court granted certiorari 
to his lethal injection challenge.

"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 2 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.

Glossip had lived at the motel since 1995, when he was hired by the owner, 
Barry Van Treese, a father of 5 who lived some 90 miles away and owned a second 
motel in Tulsa. Van Treese happened to be visiting Oklahoma City, but he 
generally relied on Glossip to run the daily operations, only dropping by a 
couple times a month to pay his staff and check on the property. For managing 
the Best Budget Inn, Glossip received a salary of $1,500 a month, as well as 
room and board in the apartment adjacent to the motel's office. On Mondays, 
which were usually slower nights, he and Wood would lock the front door to the 
motel around 2 a.m. Any guest trying to check in after that hour had to ring a 
buzzer to get in.

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.

Sneed's fingerprints were also all over the room. DNA would later be collected 
from a $100 bill stolen from several thousand dollars in motel cash receipts 
stashed under the seat of Van Treese's gray Buick - that, too, would match 
Sneed. A week later, on January 14, Sneed was arrested.

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 9 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.

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 5 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 % interest in the 
motel. (Donna Van Treese, Barry's widow, testified at each of Glossip's 2 
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 7o'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, 2 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 1/2 
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.

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 1st 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 
2nd 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, 2 separate juries found the case against Glossip convincing enough to 
convict him and sentence him to die. Glossip's 1st 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 2nd trial.

In 2001, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals called the case against Glossip 
at the 1st 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 
2nd 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 2nd 
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 1st confession to 
police in 1997 and his testimony at Glossip's 1st trial in June 1998. Sneed's 
story changed yet again when he testified at Glossip's 2nd 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 1st 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 2nd 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 2nd 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 5 or 6 times, but then Van Treese appeared to get "paranoid," and 
left the room.

Finally, at Glossip's 2nd 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 1st appeal that led the appellate 
court to overturn Glossip's conviction. After that, he was asked to stay on and 
represent Glossip at the 2nd 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 2nd 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 2 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 1/2 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 % 
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, 10 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 1st 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, 4 of Oklahoma's 10 death row exonerations involved false snitch 
testimony, and in 2 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."

(source: firstlook.org)

**********************************

"I want people to know I didn't kill this man," Death row inmate still claims 
innocence


Richard Glossip, 52, will be the next Oklahoma inmate to be executed under the 
state lethal injection protocol approved by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Court of Criminal Appeals set Glossip's execution date for September 15, 
2016.

Glossip will be put to death for his role in the brutal murder of Barry Van 
Treese in 1997.

Late last year, Ali Meyer traveled to McAlester to talk with Glossip about his 
case, his execution and his claims of innocence.

"I'm prepared for whatever happens, but it's not easy," Glossip said behind a 
wall of thick glass and metal bars. "It's like you're in a tomb, just waiting 
to die so they can finish it off. You hardly get any contact, and the contact 
you have is with guards. It's hard; harder than people think it is. People 
think we've got it easy down here. It's not true."

Richard Eugene Glossip has been on Oklahoma's death row for 17 years.

"The dying part doesn't bother me. Everybody dies, but I want people to know I 
didn't kill this man (Barry Van Treese]. I didn't participate or plan or 
anything to do with this crime. I want people to know that it's not just for me 
that I'm speaking out. It's for other people on death row around this country 
who are innocent and are going to be executed for something they didn't do. 
It's not right that it's happening. We're in a country where that should never 
happen."

Richard Glossip was convicted of murder-for-hire in the 1997 death of Barry Van 
Treese.

"They offered me a life sentence at my 2nd trial. I turned it down because I'm 
not going to stand there and admit to something that I didn't do. Even though 
my attorneys said I was an idiot for turning it down because I could end up 
back on death row. I prefer death row than to tell somebody I committed a crime 
I didn't do." Glossip said. "I understand people want the death penalty, 
especially in the state of Oklahoma because of the crimes that are committed. I 
understand that even though I don't believe in it. But, one thing you should be 
absolutely sure about is that you're not about to kill an innocent man."

Glossip's co-worker, Justin Sneed, confessed to the murder of Barry Van Treese. 
Sneed testified against Glossip in exchange for his life. Sneed is now serving 
a life sentence.

"I wake up and look at these walls and think, 'How the hell am I here?' I think 
about it, try to figure out what went wrong. I just can't figure it out. It's a 
scary thing."

The State of Oklahoma will use the controversial execution drug Midazolam to 
put Richard Glossip to death.

"It just really doesn't make any sense to me what's going on. They're just in 
such a hurry to kill."

Last year, the State of Oklahoma spent 5 months revamping the death chamber to 
carry out executions.

"You're crammed in this box and every day you think about dying. You know 
they're putting these cells up there to stick you in. I think that's when it 
got even scarier the day they started construction because then you know 
they're going through all this stuff to make sure they kill somebody. That's a 
scary thing to think about."

(source: KFOR news)