Okla. AG Drummond files brief with U.S. Supreme Court seeking to halt execution of death row inmate

OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. — Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed a brief on Tuesday with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to halt the execution of Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip.

The brief details why the execution should be halted and Glossip’s conviction should be remanded back to the district court.

The brief calls the decision made by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals (OCCA) in April 2023 to uphold Glossip’s conviction and death sentence for the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese despite the State’s confession of prosecutorial misconduct “remarkable and remarkably flawed.”

Glossip was convicted of first-degree murder in 1998. Later, the OCCA overturned the conviction for ineffective assistance of counsel. However, Glossip was again convicted and sentenced to death in 2004 when the star witness provided false testimony during a retrial.

“Dismissing violations of those constitutional bedrocks on the ground that suitably skeptical and intrepid defense counsel should have assumed the government was concealing and prevaricating and gotten to the truth anyways eviscerates those bedrock precedents,” states the filing. “And the notion that a reasonable factfinder would have ignored evidence that the prosecution’s star witness was suffering from a serious mental illness and committed perjury is equally unfathomable.”

The full filing can be read here.