OKLAHOMA CITY — Just days after Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond sent a brief requesting the execution be halted, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday stayed the May 18 execution of Richard Glossip.
Drummond made the argument in a 14-page brief to the high court, which said the state “recently made the difficult decision to confess error and support vacating the conviction of Richard Glossip in a Successive Application for Post-Conviction Relief filed with the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals.”
Glossip was sentenced to death of his role in the 1997 murder-for-hire of Barry Van Treese. Glossip was scheduled to die by lethal injection on May 18.
Drummond’s brief said new information showed that Glossip’s capital sentence cannot be sustained.
“The equities strongly favor a stay of execution,” Drummond wrote. “As Glossip indicated in his application, he will clearly suffer irreparable harm if he were executed despite the State’s conclusion that the conviction can no longer be supported. Further, given its confession of error, the State will not suffer any harm through the grant of a stay. Finally, the public interest is clearly served by not executing a man after the State has concluded that the conviction cannot be sustained. Therefore, the balance of equities strongly favors a stay of execution in this case.”
Following the court’s stay, Drummond issued a short statement praising the action.
“I’m very grateful to the U.S. Supreme Court for their decision to grant a stay of execution,” he wrote. “I will continue working to ensure justice prevails in this important case.”
Acting for the high court, Justice Brett Kavanaugh granted the stay pending the disposition of two writs for certiorari. Should either petition be granted, Kavanaugh wrote, the state would terminate once the court made a ruling.
Glossip’s attorney, Don Knight, said he hoped the high court would reverse the decision of the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals and vacate Glossip’s execution once and for all. State Reps. Kevin McDugle (R-Broken Arrow) and Justin Humphrey (R-Lane) said they, too, were pleased by the court’s decision.
Former Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater said Glossip was guilty. Prater told The Associated Press that Glossip persuaded Justin Sneed to kill Van Treese.
“When the police came to talk to Glossip about Van Treese’s whereabouts, he directed him away from the room he knew Van Treese was in,” Prater said. “At any point, Glossip had the opportunity to tell the police that Sneed did this. He never did that. He even helped Sneed clean up everything.”
McDugle, Humphrey and several other state lawmakers have called for Glossip’s execution to be halted.
Humphrey said he was thrilled by the stay.
“It’s a victory right now,” he said. “We have many, many steps to go before we see a new trial – which is what we are requesting.”
He said any impartial individual reviewing all the evidence would agree that the case needs to be sent back to court. Humphrey said Drummond played a key role in securing the stay. “We wouldn’t have gotten this far without Drummond,” he said. Humphrey said the state needed to take bigger steps to ensure death penalty cases were transparent and that the ‘bad apples’ involved in those cases were identified.
“There has to be checks and balances,” he said.
McDugle, speaking on NBC News, said the stay would give Oklahoma the opportunity to look under the hood (of capital punishment crimes). “I want to be very clear about this and we’ve got to say this publicly. We have some great DAs in Oklahoma, and we have some great judges in Oklahoma. But the ones that are involved in this particular case, we’ve gotta call them out so that this doesn’t happen again. I’m excited the Supreme Court made this decision.”
(Editor’s Note: The Associated Press contributed to this story.)