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(CNN) The Oklahoma Attorney General is seeking a new trial in the case of death row inmate Richard Grossip, who lost his boss in 1997.
In a motion filed with the Oklahoma Court of Appeals on Thursday, Attorney General Gentner F. changed its position,” he said.
The request came after a special counsel report released Thursday recommended that Glossip’s death sentence be overturned and that he be given a new trial.
Glossip, 60, claims he was not involved in the murder of his boss, Barry Van Treese. He narrowly avoided death three times, as previous execution days ended in reprieves or stays.
The Oklahoma Court of Appeals is now deciding whether to grant or deny the new trial request. Glossip is currently scheduled to run on May 18th.
Grossip, a former motel manager, has been in prison for 26 years. He was found guilty of ordering the murder of Van Trees.
Another employee, Justin Snead, who was 19 at the time, admitted to killing Van Trees with a baseball bat in Oklahoma City. However, prosecutors told jurors that Snead killed Van Trees in a hired murder scheme orchestrated by Grossip.
Sneed is sentenced to life in prison in exchange for testifying against Glossip.
But recently uncovered evidence proves Glossip’s innocence, his lawyers say.
Grossip’s attorney, Don Knight, said in a statement Thursday: “It is clear that it would be unconscionable for the state to proceed with the execution of Mr. Grossip at a time when there are so many doubts surrounding his conviction.” Stated.
“I thank General Drummond for his courageous decision to consider this difficult case in greater depth, and have asked the Court of Criminal Appeals to expeditiously grant the Attorney General’s request and to appoint Mr. Grossip for further proceedings. I request that the case be remanded to the court of first instance,” added Nighter.
“Do I have the option to withdraw my testimony?”
International law firm Reed Smith spent more than 3,000 unpaid hours investigating Grossip’s case, and last year issued a 343-page report at the request of a bipartisan group of legislators.
An independent investigation “uncovered the state’s deliberate destruction of evidence prior to trial and a poor police investigation,” Reed-Smith said.
Later, the law firm and Grossip’s lawyers found more evidence, including a letter Snead had written in prison. This letter is part of an amendment to Reed Smith’s original report.
“There are a lot of things that are bothering me right now.
In a letter from Justin Snead to his attorney, Grossip’s defense alleges that he may have sought to retract his testimony.
In another letter, Snead wrote, “Do I have the option to withdraw my testimony at any time in my life…?”
In a separate letter shown to CNN, Snead’s public defender responded to one of his letters by saying, “From the tone of your letter, I can tell that a few things are bothering you. I see…if you refused[to testify against Glossip]you are most likely on death row right now.”
The Oklahoma County Public Defender’s Office, which represented Sneed’s attorney at the time, declined to comment.
Grossip’s attorney Knight said, “We always suspected Justin Snead really wanted to tell the truth.” Nonetheless, it turns out his lawyer at the time had told him, ‘Don’t do it.
Attorney General Drummond said in a news release Thursday that Grossip’s “murder conviction and death sentence cannot be upheld.”
“This is not to say that I believe he is innocent. “Given all I know about this case, I do not believe that justice can be served by executing a man on the basis of compromised witness testimony.”
Last 3 meals and expect to die again and again
Knight told CNN earlier this year that Glossip has been threatened with execution three times before, and that his last meal was served on three separate occasions.
Richard Grossip’s attorney, Don Knight, will file papers within the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals in July 2022 to request a new hearing for his client.
He was sentenced to death in 1998 and convicted, but the sentence was overturned in 2001 due to the ineffectiveness of his defense counsel.
He was convicted again in 2004 and sentenced to death again. That year, when the governor issued a stay based on the constitutionality of the state’s execution protocol, Glossip was more than an hour past his execution time.
Grossip’s decades on death row have been punctuated by a series of reprieves and stays of execution.
In an interview with CNN earlier this year, Glossip said he still feels uneasy as their respective execution dates approach.
“It’s still scary, until they finally open this door and let me go, or take this out of my head completely, because it’s always scary, like, ‘Are they going to kill me next month? Or the month after that?’ When will time finally run out?”
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