Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip challenges conviction again as execution looms

Death row inmate Richard Glossip is scared, his attorney said Friday.

The inmate filed a new challenge Friday morning to his conviction, coincidentally just hours after his execution was set for Sept. 22. He claimed again he is "factually innocent".

He also claimed prosecutors intentionally destroyed evidence, his trial attorneys were ineffective and he is ineligible for the death penalty because of intellectual disability.

The 120-page filing is based largely on a new investigative report done on his case for free by an international law firm, Reed Smith.

"I'm scared right now that nobody will listen," he said Thursday, attorney Don Knight said. "That nobody will care, that this work has been done to show that I didn't do anything, that I'm not somebody who's capable of murdering anyone and yet they won't do anything."

Knight, a Colorado attorney, spoke with Glossip about the report Thursday at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.

Glossip, 59, is on death row for the 1997 beating death of his boss, Oklahoma City motel owner Barry Van Treese. A motel maintenance man, Justin Sneed, confessed to the killing, saying Glossip offered to pay him $10,000 to do it to keep from being fired.

He is asking the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to order an evidentiary hearing and, eventually, reverse his conviction.

Among his supporters are Republican legislators, who got the law firm to conduct an investigation of the case. The law firm's report was made public June 15.

"The report contains a significant amount of new information that was not previously known and has never been presented to a court," his attorneys told the Court of Criminal Appeals.

"It identifies a wide range of failings throughout the process, including the State's intentional destruction of important evidence, unreliable interrogation tactics, shoddy collection and retention of evidence, failure to take important investigatory steps, and crucial evidence never presented to the jury that counters the State's theories and casts great doubt on the reliability of its witnesses."

The attorneys contend Sneed framed Glossip to avoid the death penalty himself after killing the motel owner during a botched robbery for drug money. They claim Sneed, a meth addict, made admissions in jail and later in prison about framing Glossip.

One prisoner reported Sneed openly bragged multiple times about the deal he had made to save his life and that Glossip had not done anything, the attorneys said.

The Court of Criminal Appeals is expected to reject the claims as it has done before. "None of the trial witnesses have recanted their testimony and Glossip has presented no credible evidence that the witnesses gave falsified testimony at trial," the court ruled in 2015.

"All of this has been litigated," Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater said.

Prater also said any claim that anyone from the district attorney's office intentionally ordered evidence to be destroyed before Glossip's retrial in 2004 is "an outright lie."

An outspoken Glossip supporter, Rep. Kevin McDugle, R-Broken Arrow, said the new challenge "includes new evidence that I don't believe any court can ignore."

"It is possible for somebody to end up on death row that's innocent," McDugle said. "I mean we've already had 10 in the state of Oklahoma."

Legislators and Glossip's attorneys have described the free work on the case by the Reed Smith law firm as an independent investigation. Critics of the report point out the firm has assisted a nonprofit called Reprieve that advocates for people on death row. Reprieve has been praised by actress Susan Sarandon, who has spoken out in support of Glossip in the past.