SCOTUS NEWS
on Jan 22, 2024
at 10:43 am
The justices agreed to listen to Glossip v. Oklahoma in a listing of orders on Monday. (Guyyoung1966 by way of Wikimedia Commons)
Eight years after the Supreme Courtroom blocked his execution in order that it may take into account a problem to Oklahoma’s lethal-injection protocol, the justices agreed on Monday to take up the case of Richard Glossip, who’s looking for to put aside his conviction and dying sentence. In an uncommon twist, Oklahoma Lawyer Basic Gentner Drummond supported Glossip’s petition for overview, telling the courtroom that “justice wouldn’t be served by shifting ahead with a capital sentence that the State can not defend due to prosecutorial misconduct and cumulative error.”
Glossip was sentenced to dying for the 1997 homicide of Barry Van Treese, the proprietor of the Oklahoma Metropolis motel the place Glossip labored as a supervisor. The one proof implicating Glossip in Van Treese’s dying was testimony from Justin Sneed, a handyman on the resort, who instructed jurors that Glossip paid him $10,000 to kill Van Treese. In alternate for his testimony, prosecutors assured Sneed that he can be spared the dying penalty.
Glossip requested an Oklahoma courtroom to put aside his conviction and sentence final 12 months. He stated that in January 2023 he had obtained new data, together with prosecutors’ notes, indicating that Sneed had testified falsely about whether or not he had seen a psychiatrist when he had the truth is been handled for bipolar dysfunction and prescribed lithium.
Drummond appointed Rex Duncan, a former district legal professional in Oklahoma, as an unbiased counsel to overview Glossip’s case. In April 2023, Duncan reported that he believed a brand new trial was essential as a result of “Glossip was disadvantaged of a good trial through which the State can trust within the course of and end result.”
Based mostly on Duncan’s report, Drummond joined Glossip in asking the Oklahoma Courtroom of Prison Appeals, the state’s highest courtroom for felony circumstances, to put aside Glossip’s conviction, however the courtroom rejected that request. Lower than per week later, the state’s Pardon and Parole Board turned down Glossip’s request for clemency, which the legal professional common – apparently for the primary time within the state’s historical past – had additionally supported.
Along with his execution scheduled for Could 18, 2023, Glossip got here to the Supreme Courtroom, asking the justices – with Drummond’s help – to place his execution on maintain to provide them extra time to think about his appeals. In a short, unsigned order in early Could, the justices agreed to take action.
After contemplating Glossip’s appeals at 11 consecutive conferences, the justices agreed to resolve whether or not the state violated Glossip’s constitutional rights when prosecutors suppressed proof that their key witness was beneath a psychiatrist’s care. The courtroom didn’t act on a second petition that Glossip had filed, and which the state had opposed, involving whether or not the burden that Oklahoma courts imposed on Glossip to indicate that he was harmed by the state’s suppression of proof which may have cleared him was too excessive.
The justices additionally directed Glossip and the state to deal with a separate query: whether or not the ruling by the Oklahoma Courtroom of Prison Appeals rested on an “sufficient and unbiased state-law” floor (particularly, that Glossip was not entitled to reduction beneath state post-conviction legislation), which the Supreme Courtroom would lack the ability to overview.
Justice Neil Gorsuch didn’t take part within the consideration of Glossip’s request, presumably as a result of he had weighed in on one among Glossip’s earlier appeals when he served as a choose on the U.S. Courtroom of Appeals for the tenth Circuit. He didn’t point out if he’ll recuse himself from the case going ahead.
The justices added one other case to their deserves docket on Monday, setting the most recent chapter in a dispute over the waters of the Rio Grande River “for oral argument in the end.” The case started a decade in the past as an motion by Texas towards New Mexico, alleging that New Mexico had violated a 1938 settlement to divide the river’s waters amongst Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado.
In 2022, Texas and New Mexico reached a settlement, and an knowledgeable appointed by the courtroom advisable that or not it’s authorized. However the federal authorities, which had joined the lawsuit, objected to the settlement, and now the justices will weigh in.
The courtroom as soon as once more didn’t act on a number of of the high-profile petitions that it thought-about final week, together with a request by dad and mom and alumni to overview the constitutionality of the admissions coverage of a prestigious public magnet college within the Washington, D.C., suburbs and a pair of challenges to the constitutionality of New York’s rent-stabilization system. The justices first thought-about the New York rent-stabilization circumstances, 74 Pinehurst v. New York and 335-7 LLC v. New York, at their convention on Sept. 26, 2023 – the identical convention at which the justices thought-about Richard Glossip’s petition for overview for the primary time.
The justices are actually of their four-week winter recess. Their subsequent often scheduled convention is Friday, Feb. 16.
This text was initially printed at Howe on the Courtroom.
