On Feb. 25, 2025, in Glossip v. Oklahoma, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a new trial for Richard Glossip, an Oklahoma man first convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death in 1998—and later retried, convicted, and sentenced to death again in 2004 after his initial conviction was reversed on appeal by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. In an opinion written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court analyzed the evidence—including false testimony—presented in Glossip's case. In particular, Justice Sotomayor emphasized that the State of Oklahoma "disclosed eight boxes of previously withheld documents from Glossip's trial" nearly two decades late; that the prosecution violated Glossip's constitutional rights by failing to correct the false testimony of a key witness, Justin Sneed, at trial; and that, at trial, Sneed himself "admitted he beat" to death the murder victim, motel owner Barry Van Treese, "but testified that Glossip had offered him thousands of dollars to do so."
University of Baltimore School of Law Prof. John Bessler wrote extensively about Glossip's case as the editor of Justice Stephen Breyer's Against the Death Penalty (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2016), a book recently released in paperback. He is currently teaching capital punishment seminars at the University of Baltimore School of Law and at the Georgetown University Law Center. Prof. Bessler wrote the following analysis of the case:
Although the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Glossip's first conviction because the defense had been ineffective in challenging Justin Sneed's testimony and the remainder of the evidence only weakly corroborated Sneed's account, Glossip has spent many years on death row and nearly half his life behind bars. In fact, the evidence shows that, on January 6, 1997, Justin Sneed—a crucial witness who testified falsely at Glossip's capital trial—beat to death with a baseball bat Barry Van Treese, the owner of a Best Budget Inn that Glossip, who lived there with his girlfriend, was then managing in Oklahoma City.
While Sneed admitted to killing the victim, Glossip continually professed his innocence and denied any involvement in the murder. Sneed later testified that Glossip had asked him to kill Van Treese, with Sneed's accusation against Glossip leading to the prosecution's capital murder charge against him. "Glossip," Justice Sotomayor observed in the Court's recent decision, "disclaimed any knowledge of Van Treese's murder, but admitted that he helped Sneed replace (from the outside) the broken window of the room where Van Treese's body was later found."
Sneed—a man, as Justice Sotomayor wrote in Glossip v. Oklahoma, with "a history of violence, angry outbursts, and substance abuse that included marijuana, methamphetamine, cocaine, and acid"—pleaded guilty to Van Treese's murder and is serving a life sentence. But Sneed testified against Glossip at trial after accepting a plea deal to avoid the death penalty, with Glossip having rejected a similar plea offer. The eight boxes of previously withheld documents—as Justice Sotomayor's opinion notes—"show that Sneed suffered from bipolar disorder" and "also established, the State agrees, that a jail psychiatrist prescribed Sneed lithium to treat that condition, and that the prosecution allowed Sneed falsely to testify at trial that he had never seen a psychiatrist."
"After killing Van Treese," Justice Sotomayor wrote, "Sneed evaded law enforcement for several days."
"Eventually," she stressed of the investigation into the murder, "police located and interviewed Sneed, who had $1,680 in bloody cash on him."
Glossip, now 62, has long maintained his innocence throughout his appeals. In 2022, after a law firm's independent investigation conducted at the behest of a bipartisan group of 62 Oklahoma legislators, that law firm, Reed Smith, reported its "grave doubt as to the integrity of Glossip's murder conviction and death sentence."
"Among other things, Reed Smith concluded the prosecution had deliberately destroyed 'key physical evidence' before Glossip's retrial, including several items from the crime scene," Justice Sotomayor wrote in Glossip v. Oklahoma, adding of what transpired before Glossip's trial, "The prosecution offered Glossip a deal: plead guilty and avoid the death sentence in return for testifying against Sneed. When Glossip refused, maintaining his innocence, the State offered Sneed the same deal, and Sneed accepted."
Read the reports from Reed Smith.
The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Glossip v. Oklahoma (2025) rests on a violation of Napue v. Illinois, 360 U.S. 264 (1959) and the new evidence brought to light by Reed Smith's detailed investigation. "In Napue v. Illinois," Justice Sotomayor observed, "this Court held that a conviction knowingly 'obtained through use of false evidence' violates the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause."
"Here," Justice Sotomayor wrote, noting the materiality of Justin Sneed's testimony, "Oklahoma's attorney general joins Glossip in asserting a Napue error, conceding both that Sneed's testimony was false and that the prosecution knowingly failed to correct it."
"Sneed's testimony was the only direct evidence of Glossip's guilt of capital murder," Justice Sotomayor stressed in remanding the case for a new trial, chiding the prosecution for failing to correct Sneed's false testimony at trial.
"Besides Sneed," Sotomayor observed, "no other witness and no physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese's murder."
In his introduction to Justice Breyer's book, Prof. Bessler wrote that "with Glossip's conviction and death sentence so dependent on Justin Sneed's testimony,” questions about the reliability of Glossip's conviction had "swirled about" in the wake of revelations of new evidence, including from an inmate, Joseph Tapley, who asserted that Sneed had acted alone. Against the Death Penalty reprinted the full dissent of Justice Breyer in the case of Glossip v. Gross (2015), an unsuccessful challenge to Oklahoma's lethal injection protocol in which Justice Breyer called for a "full briefing" on whether the death penalty violates the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment. In the United States, the Death Penalty Information Center has already documented 200 death row exonerations since 1973. See Facts about the Death Penalty from the Death Penalty Information Center (last updated Feb. 14, 2025).
Before the U.S. Supreme Court granted Glossip a new trial in Glossip v. Oklahoma (2025), Glossip had been scheduled for execution nine separate times and—having ordered his "last meal" three times—came extremely close to being executed on multiple occasions, often getting reprieves only shortly before his scheduled execution dates.
"Had the prosecution corrected Sneed on the stand, his credibility plainly would have suffered," Justice Sotomayor wrote for the majority of the Court in Glossip v. Oklahoma, adding: "That correction would have revealed to the jury not just that Sneed was untrustworthy ... but also that Sneed was willing to lie to them under oath."
"[W]e conclude that the prosecution's failure to correct Sneed's trial testimony violated the Due Process Clause," the Court ruled.
In his prior dissent in Glossip v. Gross (2015), Justice Breyer—joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg—had written: "Today's administration of the death penalty involves three fundamental constitutional defects: (1) serious unreliability, (2) arbitrariness in application, and (3) unconscionably long delays that undermine the death penalty's penological purpose. Perhaps as a result, (4) most places within the United States have abandoned its use."
A leading opponent of capital punishment, Prof. Bessler—also currently a visiting scholar at the University of Minnesota Law School's Human Rights Center and an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center—is the author of multiple books and law review articles about the death penalty. Among those books: The Death Penalty's Denial of Fundamental Human Rights: International Law, State Practice, and the Emerging Abolitionist Norm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023); The Death Penalty as Torture: From the Dark Ages to Abolition (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2017); Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty and the Founders' Eighth Amendment (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2012); Legacy of Violence: Lynch Mobs and Executions in Minnesota (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and Death in the Dark: Midnight Executions in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997).
One of his recent law review articles—Taking Psychological Torture Seriously: The Torturous Nature of Credible Death Threats and the Collateral Consequences for Capital Punishment, 11 NE. UNIV. L. REV. 11 (2019)—explores the torturous nature of credible death threats, including of mock, or simulated, executions.