The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted a new trial to Richard Glossip, a death row inmate in Oklahoma whose challenge to his conviction led to an extraordinary concession from the state’s attorney general.
State lawmakers from both political parties, along with celebrities like Kim Kardashian, had called for clemency or a new trial.
Most crucially, Attorney General Gentner Drummond of Oklahoma, a Republican, had asked the justices to throw out Mr. Glossip’s 2004 conviction and order a retrial.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the majority, said prosecutors had failed to correct false testimony from their star witness, violating Mr. Glossip’s due process rights. “Glossip is entitled to a new trial,” she wrote.
Mr. Glossip was convicted of arranging the death of his employer, the owner of a motel in Oklahoma City. Two independent investigations cast doubt on his guilt, saying critical evidence had been withheld and major testimony was faulty.
Mr. Glossip’s conviction was based almost entirely on the testimony of the state’s star witness, a handyman named Justin Sneed who had pleaded guilty to killing Barry Van Treese, the motel owner, beating him to death in 1997 with a baseball bat.
In exchange for a life sentence, Mr. Sneed agreed to testify against Mr. Glossip, the motel’s manager. Mr. Sneed said Mr. Glossip had instructed him to kill Mr. Van Treese.
Recently disclosed notes appeared to contradict Mr. Sneed’s testimony about whether he had been treated by a psychiatrist, and they seemed to show that he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
“When I was arrested,” Mr. Sneed testified, “I asked for some Sudafed because I had a cold, but then shortly after that somehow they ended up giving me lithium for some reason.”
“I don’t know why,” he added. “I never seen no psychiatrist or anything.”
The prosecutor, Connie Smothermon, emphasized that testimony. “So you don’t know why they gave you that?” she asked. Mr. Sneed said no.
Lawyers for Mr. Glossip and the state said that Mr. Sneed had testified falsely about how he came to be taking lithium and that Ms. Smothermon had failed to correct him.
They pointed to newly disclosed notes, prepared by Ms. Smothermon, containing two contested phrases. “On Lithium?” one said. “Dr Trumpet?” said another. The second question was an apparent reference to Dr. Lawrence Trombka, who was the sole psychiatrist at the jail where Mr. Sneed was held after the murder.
The notes, both sides said, contradicted Mr. Sneed’s statements and indicated that Ms. Smothermon knowingly allowed the witness to present false testimony.
That violated, they said, the Supreme Court’s 1959 decision in Napue v. Illinois, which prohibits prosecutors from knowingly presenting false testimony.
Because both sides agreed that Mr. Glossip’s conviction should be overturned, the court appointed Christopher Michel, who once served as a law clerk to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., to argue in favor of allowing the execution to proceed. Mr. Michel told the justices that Mr. Glossip and the state were relying on a strained interpretation of the two notations.
Justice Sotomayor stressed that the case hinged on Mr. Sneed.
“Besides Sneed, no other witness and no physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese’s murder,” she wrote. “Thus, the jury could convict Glossip only if it believed Sneed.”
Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the majority opinion in the case, Glossip v. Oklahoma, No. 22-7466.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in a partial dissent, said the court had gone too far in ordering a new trial. She said she would have sent the case back to the state courts to determine how to proceed.
Justice Clarence Thomas, joined in full by Justice Samuel Alito A. Alito Jr., and in part by Justice Barrett, filed a sharp dissent. “The court stretches the law at every turn,” he wrote.
The contested testimony, Justice Thomas wrote, was “patently immaterial.”
“There is no reason to think,” he added, “that disclosing Sneed’s bipolar disorder would have affected the outcome of the trial.”
Mr. Glossip’s case has been convoluted even by the standards of capital litigation. The Supreme Court has considered six of his petitions seeking review, granting two. Nine scheduled execution dates have come and gone. He has been served three last meals.
Mr. Glossip was also the subject of a landmark 2015 decision in which the court, by a 5-to-4 vote, endorsed executing condemned inmates with a combination of chemicals that the dissenters said would leave them “exposed to what may well be the chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake.”
Mr. Drummond, Oklahoma’s attorney general, said he had decided to support Mr. Glossip’s bid for a new trial after ordering an independent review of the case shortly after he took office in 2023.
“Our justice system is greatly diminished when an individual is convicted without a fair trial,” Mr. Drummond said in a statement, “but today we can celebrate that a great injustice has been swept away.”
Don Knight, one of Mr. Glossip’s lawyers, said Tuesday’s decision was a vindication.
“We are thankful that a clear majority of the court supports longstanding precedent that prosecutors cannot hide critical evidence from defense lawyers and cannot stand by while their witnesses knowingly lie to the jury,” he said in a statement. “Rich Glossip, who has maintained his innocence for 27 years, will now be given the chance to have the fair trial that he has always been denied.”
