June 23, 2021 • 52 mins
On January 7th, 1997, the owner of the Best Budget Inn in Oklahoma City was beaten to death with a baseball bat at his motel by admitted killer, thief, and methamphetamine addict Justin Sneed. Mr. Sneed, fearful of the death penalty, falsely accused his boss, Richard Glossip, of masterminding the murder for hire plot in exchange for leniency. Now, Richard sits on death row in Oklahoma where his time is running out.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Richard Glossop was the manager of a Cede motel in
Oklahoma City called the Best Budget in where he was
responsible for large sums of cash belonging to its owner,
Barry Van Trees, cash that he could have stolen at
any time without violence. A traveling roofer and meth addict
named Justin Snee began staying at the motel in exchange
for maintenance work, while enjoying easy access to the drugs
(00:24):
and prostitutes one might find at a CD motel. In
the early morning of January seven, Stead and a girlfriend
lured Barry van Trees into Room one O two to
rob him of the cash he was known to carry.
Barry resisted and was bludgeoned at stabbed to death. His
car was moved to a nearby lot. Later that morning,
(00:46):
sneyed off handedly told Richard that he had killed Barry,
but after seeing that Barry's car was not at its
usual spot, Richard dismissed what he thought was Sneed's usual
drug adult ramblings. When the body was discovered, Richard told
police about what Sneed had said, causing them to focus
on him. Even though Sneed eventually confessed, police steered him
(01:07):
to implicate Richard as the mastermind of a murder for
higher scheme. For his testimony, Sneed escaped the death penalty
in exchange for life without parole, swapping Richard into his place.
The word of a meth head and alleged motive to
steal cash was all. It took. Twenty four years, two trials,
three stays of execution, a lethal injection drug scandal, and
(01:30):
two Supreme Court cases later, Richard remains a death row
in Oklahoma. This is wrongful Conviction with Jason Flopper. Welcome
(01:53):
back to wrongful conviction with Jason flomm That's me. And
if I sound a little down today, it's because this
case Ace that you're going to hear about is one
of the most troubling cases I've ever heard of in
my now twenty ninth year of doing this type of work.
With us today we have one of the respected, even
(02:16):
revered criminal and civil defense attorneys, a man named Don Knight.
Welcome to ronfle Conviction. Thank you, Jason. I appreciate that,
and of course with us today calling in from the
Oklahoma State Penitentiary where he is now in his twenty
third year on death row. And that is of course
(02:37):
Richard Gloss. Hello, this is a collect call from and
incarcerated individual at Oklahoma State Penitentiary. This call is not private.
This call will be recorded and may be monitored. To
consent to this recorded call, press one to disconnect. Thank
you for using securance. You may start the conversation now. Hello, Richard.
(03:00):
I'm sorry you're here under these circumstances, but I'm happier here.
Oh that's cool. That's cool. Twenty four years of this
and uh, it's been a long battle and it just continues.
But the good thing is I'm still here. Richard, you
don't mind take us back to your childhood. Use that
sort of an unusual childhood and moved from Illinois to Oklahoma.
But also, you were one of a lot of children, right,
(03:22):
You had a lot of brothers and sisters. Yeah. And
I actually grew up in Gillsborge, Illinois. There was sixteen
of us. There was eight boys and eight girls. You know,
I grew up around a lot of addiction and stuff
like that, and you know, I just didn't think I
was going to get anywhere if I stayed there any longer.
And left home when I was fourteen and just made
it on my own. You know, it's actually kind of
a miracle that you survived. I mean, we could do
(03:45):
a whole podcast about that alone, but your story hadn't
even begun yet. So okay, you were strange from your
family for many years, working and getting by. But how
did you end up in Oklahoma where you got a
job at the best budget in working for Barry Van Trees.
My mom and dad retired and they decided to move
(04:06):
out here to Oklahoma to be closer to my mom's family,
and my dad's health was selling and my mom asked
me if I would come out here in some times
with my dad, and that's how I ended up with
the best budget in. Barry Van Tresse didn't just run
the best budget in Oklahoma City, he also ran best
budget in in Tulsa. These were really low rent motels.
(04:30):
They were a cash business. There was a lot of
drug activity and prostitution. Barry Van trest would come by
every couple of weeks to the Oklahoma City Best Budget
in where he would pick up the cash from Rich.
Rich would have sometimes up to thirty dollars in receipts
depending on how long it took for Van Trees to
come by. The motel. So Rich was constantly handling large
(04:54):
amounts of money, and there was never any question about
whether Rich was stealing money. He was not steal anything
at all, right, And if he wanted to steal the money,
he could have done so almost any time without violence,
and he could have skipped down. But he never did,
and certainly he didn't do so by involving a math
head named Justin Snead. Now Justin had come through town
with a roof and crew out of Texas, and while
(05:16):
he was staying at the best budget in he worked
out a deal for a free room and exchange for
a maintenance and other work around the motel. Right, yes,
I said, hey, I need you to go take care
of this, or he needs to take these people from
toils or whatever the case. Maybe he always did it,
but as time went by, he was getting harder to
find him, and I was gonna let him go a
couple of times, but you know, very like the fact
(05:37):
that he was working beru but very good moment to
let him goes. But towards all this happening, in the end,
it was like I hardly ever found him to do
what he was supposed to do. Did you catch any
signs that he was using math, Well, they were up
all the time. So I did have a couple of
family members that did it, and so learning from how
(05:58):
they acted, you know, I could tell that, yeah, definitely
they want something. Justin was a very odd guy. He
would say things that would throw you off. He would
say things that would just make you scratch your head
and gold Man, this guy is just like really weird.
So were there any signs that he might have been
robbing people to support his habit? Yeah, you know, I
have one of the guy named John Biebers came to
(06:20):
me and that that he was missing a big jar
of coins. When he said he thought Justin did it,
I didn't believe him, but hindsight right, Yeah, it sure is.
And at the time, you and your girlfriend Diana would
were spending a lot of time together and most of
it at the motel. Yeah. I lived on the property.
I lived behind the front desk in an apartment, so
I'm always on the property other than like Dena and
(06:42):
I've been able to go out and do something on
our own. Why the death work was there? Now? This
brings us all the way up to January seven, at
six am. Justin sneed woke Rich up and told him
about a broken window and then kind of off handily says, oh,
and by the way, I killed Barry. Now, Snead was
known for saying weird stuff like that, and so when
(07:03):
Richard looked at Barry's usual parking spot and didn't see
Barry's car, he wrote it off as Sneed just being sneaed. Now,
later on, Barry van tress car was spotted in the
Credit Union parking lot, about fifty yards away from the
best budget in but there was no sign of Barry.
So this kicked off a search, and rich was out
shopping with his Girlfrienddianna and was called back to work
(07:24):
around three pm. So at this point rich is wondering
do I tell the police about what Sneed said, but
he Indiana decided against it because they didn't even know
if Barry was dead or not, And finally at ten pm,
Barry's body was discovered in room one oh two. He
had been beaten with a baseball bat as well as
having been stabbed with a blunt object. What happened here
(07:48):
was that Barry van Trese stopped in in the evening
of January six, took care of payroll and took care
of everybody at the Best Budget in Oklahoma City before
leaving and driving Tulsa to take care of of the
payroll and the situation in Tulsa. He didn't get to
Tulsa till around midnight or so, and didn't stay there
(08:10):
very long, told the people and Tulsa, and he left
to tell his wife that he would be home in
five and a half hours. Home was Lawton, Oklahoma. It
doesn't take five and a half hours to get to Lawton,
so obviously, when he said that he had plans to stop,
he stopped back at the Best Budget in in Oklahoma
City where he went to room one oh two, and
(08:33):
that's where Justin Sneed was waiting for him, or at
least his girlfriend was waiting for him. Because we have
found out that there was another person involved in this case.
It wasn't Rich Glossop, but it was Justin Sneed's girlfriend.
The information that we have found is that it was
simply a robbery attempt. These two meth fueled young people
(08:58):
thought they could simply take the keys from Barry Van
Trese and get the money out of his car without
Van Trese knowing or objecting. I don't know what their
plan was. We talked to one witness and she had
a great statement. She said, when you've been on mess
for twenty days in a row, the idea fairy appears.
(09:20):
That looks like what happened here. These two people knew
Barry Ventres had a lot of money, and so we
think that he was lured into room one o two
by this girl. He knew he was coming back to
that place, and once they're confronted by Justin Snead. From
the information we have that we have found from new witnesses,
(09:41):
Snead admitted that he was intending simply to take Van
Trese's money and not kill him. But Van Trese fought back,
and at the end of that fight, Barry van Trese
was beaten to death. It wasn't just beaten to death,
but there was also some stab wounds on his body
from a very blunt object. And the blunt object appears
(10:01):
to be a pocket knife that the police found in
the motel room that had its tip broken off. So
for this murder, Justin Sneed and his girlfriend had two weapons,
a baseball bat and a broken knife. That would be
really low on anyone's choices of how to go right,
(10:22):
um sure, But also I think low on somebody's idea
of how to kill somebody. I mean, if you're really
planning to murder someone, you don't go with a dull
knife in a baseball bat. You know. It sounds like
a bad plan from mess fueled young people, and the
aftermath was a continuation of that bad plan. The vehicle
(10:43):
where the money was was moved not more than fifty yards,
not as if it was moved away so that it
could be hidden. It was within plain view of the
best budget in in a credit union, right next to
the best budget in. It was found there the next
morning by the security guard off duty Sheriff's deputy working
(11:04):
at the way Yoke credit Union found this vehicle sort
of with one tire up on the curb, parked in
a place that it shouldn't be parked, and that's what
started the investigation on the seventh into Barry Van Tresea's death.
So you might notice that Rich hasn't been mentioned yet
in the story of this crime, and that's because no one,
(11:25):
not even the prosecution, ever claimed that he was even
in the room when it happened. Rich was sleeping in
the apartment behind the front desk with his girlfriend. That's undisputed.
So why are we even having this conversation and how
is Rich on death row? Well, the lead investigators in
this case BMLINKOK, who did little to no investigation, basically
(11:49):
didn't talk to anyone at the motel and instead focused
on Richard early on. For a few very ill conceived reasons.
They focused on Rich and I think the first reason
is Rich's last name is Gloss. Rich's family was a
known family with a criminal history in Oklahoma, So I
think that's one thing. That The second thing when they
(12:11):
found Vantres's body at ten o'clock and they said, you know, Rich,
why don't you come in and sit and talk with us?
And it was at that point that Rich told them
about that statement that Snead made. That was the point
I think when the police said, oh, well, he's hiding something.
And I think that, in combination with Rich's last name,
(12:33):
I think that's what made the police begin to think
Rich Gloss have had something to do with this case.
They decide to focus on this one statement that he omitted, right,
which is I don't know that I would have done
anything differently myself. It's clearly his right to do so.
I mean, he doesn't have to talk to the police.
(12:54):
Nobody has to talk to the police. After this initial interview,
on the seventh, Rich sells some personal I was to
raise money for a lawyer and talk to an attorney
named David Mackenzie, who told him quite rightly to not
speak with the police. But Rich did what a lot
of innocent people do, right. He believed that just telling
the truth will set you free, so he talked to
(13:16):
Demo and Cook. Anyway, in the parking lot of Mackenzie's office,
the police were waiting for Rich. Rather than tell them
I can't talk to you because this lawyer just told
me this is what I'm supposed to say, Rich says, okay,
I'll talk to you. And Demo and Cook have a
real bad history of how they do their interrogations, and
(13:40):
when they set themselves upon Rich, they were going to
do what they could do to try to get Rich
to say things that they could say, We're inconsistent, and
then they would start driving that home to try to
get him to confess to this crime. But he never
does confess to the crime. However, they start trying to
(14:00):
tell him that he said things in his initial interview
on the seventh that he did not. They tried to
catch him in lies with lies of their own, and
it's clear that they have their sights set on him. Meanwhile,
Snee took off on the afternoon of the seventh, before
Barry's body was even found. He went off working with
(14:20):
the roof and crew that he came into town with
from Texas, trying to make himself scarce. Basically, yeah, he
left new motel sometime after three o'clock, just took a
skateboard and took off again. It was it's something that
the prosecutor in both trials tried to paint that he
was totally dependent on Glossip for everything because he had
no way of making any money, which was just wrong.
(14:42):
I mean, first off, he was stealing the place blind
he was, he was breaking into motel rooms, he was
breaking into cars, he was doing everything he could do
to get money for his drug habit. But when he
left the motel that day, he skateboarded over to where
the people who he used to work for doing roofing
were and he joined the roofing crew again. So he
(15:06):
had the opportunity at any point in time to go
make more money doing his roofing work than he ever
made it the best budget in and he did that
on that day. They didn't catch Snead until the fourteenth
of January. It was the owner of the roofing company
who seeing the news accounts of what had happened and
seeing Sneed's picture on the news, that said to Snead,
(15:27):
I think you need to turn yourself in. So he's
the one that called the police, and that's when they
interrogated Sneed, right, and it sneeds interrogation. It's clear that
Rich is their main target, so they start working Snead
over to both admit to the crime and implicate Rich
in some way. Yeah, this was not a situation where
they were saying, okay, justin we've we've caught you, why
don't you tell us what happened. Instead, they go through
(15:49):
this long prelude telling him what happened, telling him what
they know, telling him that they know that somebody else
was involved and they don't want him to hang alone.
And in Sneeds first is like, I don't even know
what to say. I don't want to tell you, as
if he didn't have anything to do with it, And
then they brought Rich's name into it. We think Rich
had something to do with it. You know, he's under arrest.
So Snead never said anything about glossip at all. That
(16:12):
came from the police and then they began to work
with Snead from there until they finally got this sort
of crazy idea about Rich wanting to steal the money,
killed Van Trees and split the money with Snead and
somehow or another they would run the motels. Some crazy
story that that came out, which I think you would
(16:34):
probably expect from somebody who's high on math, right and
who's being fed information by police who are exactly not
interested in the truth here. Um so, because if they
had been interested in the truth, they simply what I said,
want to tell us what happened, tell us everything that
you know. And so Snead confesses to the murder. But
what's clear from his interrogation is that he was steered
(16:56):
to drag Rich into it as the mastermind of a
murder for higher plot, and then Snead uses this made
up scenario to save himself, making a deal for a
life without parole instead of the death penalt. We have
a witness who says he talked to Snead that year
while he was in jail with Sneed and a. Snead said,
(17:17):
I had two main goals. One I didn't want the
death penalty, and too I didn't want my girlfriend to
get caught. Snead got bold of what he wanted at
Rich's expense. This episode is underwritten by Paul Weiss Rifkin,
(17:42):
Wharton and Garrison. A leading international law fer. Paul Weiss
has long had an unwavering commitment to providing impactful, pro
bono legal assistance to the most vulnerable members of our
society and in support of the public interest, including extensive
work in the criminal justice area. Detective Demo in the
(18:08):
docuseries That Was Done changed what he testified the two trials,
saying that it was a murder for hire. He gets
a statement in our docuseries where he says, Oh, I
think it was a robbery went bad. That's the original
story that Justin gave him, that it was a robbery
went bad, and they knew that that's what it was,
but they needed it to be more. In my opinion,
(18:28):
you know, prosecutors and stuff need these notches in their
belts so bad so they could further their career. And
it doesn't matter who they get that notch from, as
long as they get it. My first judge, Judge Johnson,
even even looked at the prosecutor and said, I don't
understand where this is the murder case. And she convinced
(18:49):
the judge will give me some time. And that's the
only reason the judge even allowed to go forward, because
he was convinced by a prosecutor to let her build
a case. Oh so, don there is a villain in
this story, of course, I'm talking about then district attorney
Bob Macy, who was nicknamed the Angel of Death and
(19:11):
he seemed to get off unwinning death penalty cases, innocent, guilty, whatever.
Um he played dress up like a cowboy, although he
was not a cowboy. Can you tell us about this
this awful character, Bob Macy is just one of a
handful of prosecuting attorneys in the country that really drives
(19:35):
that the death penalty in in this country, they're only
a handful of places where most of the death penalty
verdicts come from. At least that has been the way
in the past. New Orleans, there was certainly one in
Oklahoma City. And these prosecutors, they derive their power. I
think and and their their political base from seeking and
(19:56):
getting the death penalty. They look at that as being
tough on crime, and Macy certainly forged his legacy with
all of that in mind. I think the thing that
happens in these places is it can't just be one
person that does this, but it becomes a culture. He
was in power in Oklahoma City for a long time.
(20:19):
A lot of his prosecutors went on to become judges.
So now you've got not just the prosecuting attorney's office,
but they're on the bench as well. So they've got judges, prosecutors,
forensic people, you've got police, and you've got jurors who
are are just ready to go on these death penalty cases.
And they begin to sort of cow the defense bar
(20:42):
into either going along and getting their clients some kind
of plea or they lose at trial, and and these
death verdicts result. It becomes a cultural situation where you
have no one fighting anymore for the defendant, and this
sort of get on the train, get run over by
the trained mentality takes over. So Rich is charged with
(21:04):
capital murder, which the fact that he's being tried for
his life for not having killed anyone is insane in
and of itself. But that's a totally another story. And
so a trial snead testified that Rich was the mastermind
behind this murder for higher plot, thereby receiving the direct
benefit of not being sent to death row himself. I
(21:25):
feel like this should have been easy to beat. So
Rich had a terrible lawyer, guy named Wayne Faunerot. In
the first trial, he never I don't even know if
he ever tried a case before. He was completely incompetent
and put on no witnesses, didn't know how to cross
examine anybody. Basically, the case when exactly as the prosecutors
(21:47):
wanted it to go, and Rich was sentenced to death.
Baigner Rot had no idea how to do a penalty
phase in a death case. He didn't do any investigation.
I mean, Rich was a guy without a criminal history
at all. I mean, you were talking about the death
penalty in the United States. You're you're supposedly talking about
the worst of the worst. Well, Rich had never committed
a crime before. How could he possibly be the worst
(22:09):
of the worst. Is this crime bad? Yes? Is it
the worst crime ever? No, it's not the worst crime ever.
So he doesn't fit that category at all, and yet,
because of the way things were in Oklahoma at the time,
they were able to get a conviction and a death sentence.
Right So, was Rich convicted solely on the basis of
(22:29):
the testimony of a murderous meth head or was there
some sort of other evidence offered a trial? I would
answer the question in both ways. Yes, no question. It
was really all about what Snead said, and he said
very many different things at different times. He initially told
the police that Glossip told him to kill Van Tres
(22:53):
and rob him of somewhere around five thousand dollars and
they would split it. But by the time the first
trial rolled around, Snead added things like Rich told me
to go buy some meriadic acid because we were going
to melt the body and I wasn't able to do that.
So Snead had a variety of stories that ultimately came
(23:13):
out that just simply shows that he was not telling
the truth. He was never consistent with anything that he said,
and the prosecutor had to sort of cobble together what
the Court of Appeals would later call corroborating evidence that
was really really weak. From the standpoint of corroborating evidence.
They had put together a spreadsheet and an allegation that
(23:34):
Rich was stealing money, that somehow or another, the Vantry's
family knew he was stealing money and that they were
about to fire him, and Rich knew he was about
to be fired, and so that formed the motive for
Rich to do this killing. There is no real evidence
of that. We took a look at that spreadsheet, which
by the way, no one did until we got involved
(23:56):
in this case. We have to forensic accountants who looked
at it and they said, the idea that Rich was
stealing money based upon the information that we see is crazy.
So after his first conviction, Rich took his case to
the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, who called the evidence
against him extremely weak. And the Oklahoma Quarter Criminal Appeals
(24:18):
looked at the job that Wayne Faunerott did and said
this can't be okay, and they, in a unanimous verdict
which never happens on direct appeal, threw it back and
said he gets a new trial. Right. So the second
trial rolls around and Oklahoma is not done with their
dirty tricks. And you know what I'm talking about, the
way that they managed to remove an attorney who was
(24:41):
prepared to probably win this case and right this wrong.
This lawyer was the appellate lawyer for Rich, a guy
named Lynn Birch, did a great job getting the case
tossed out on appeal, decided to keep it, and was
working the case leading up to this second trial when
(25:01):
he made an error, and that is going to see
Justin Sneed the night before the trial began. They think
Lynn Birch was looking to see if there was some
way that that Snead would simply come clean and tell
the truth. The air that Lynn Burch made was not
taking an investigator with him, not taking a third party.
Because when he showed up in court the next morning,
(25:22):
the prosecutor said, Judge, we've got a problem. Lynn Burch
was threatening our witness and was harassing Justin Snead. Rather
than fight that, which I think Burch should have done,
he should have said, I didn't do anything like that.
I never said anything wrong. Let me tell you what
I told him. Put me on the witness stand, put
Sneed on the witness stand. Let's have it out. Birch
(25:42):
simply said, you know, okay, you know, I probably screwed
up in there, and he left the case the morning
of trial, which caused a six month extension. But with
Birch gone, it left it in the hands of two
lawyers who were not prepared for the trial, and he
did very little. And the lead up to the next trial,
they did no investigation, They put on no witnesses, Their
(26:05):
cross examinations were horrible. They allowed the prosecution to run
wild with leading questions. Basically, the kids were greased and
the and the prosecution just got their case through like
they wanted. In the second trial, it was really strange
because the prosecutor came into the courtroom, she looked at
the jury and she goes, I have no evidence against
Richard Glad just justin sneeded. So now it becomes who
(26:29):
you're going to believe. Every witness had new testimony, who
when they were asked or you didn't remember it the
day it happened, but you remember seven years later, and
they would sit there and say, the prosecutor helped us remember.
As a result, the results were predictable, which is that
in August two thousand, for another Oklahoma jury found Richard
(26:51):
guilty and Richard gets sentenced to death. Again. It's strange
how you go through your whole life doing what's right,
thinking that you know, if you tell the truth and
then everything's gonna be okay. Um. And then you're you're
standing there when somebody says, you know, we find you
guilty of murder and you had nothing to do with
this time, and your just your mouth just falls open
(27:13):
and this feeling comes over. You're like, how can this
possibly be happening to me? This doesn't make sense. It's
one of the strangest feelings. It's really hard to put
into word, but it's just like every part of you
just goes now. It's like you're just in shock, and
you don't know, you don't even have a response to it.
(27:34):
You just stand there and you just like you just
can't even believe it. It's one of the most overwhelming
things I've ever had to face. Um. You know when
(27:57):
I walked in, Um, they take you to the main
gate up there, and they too in this little shack
whither you wait to get people to take you down
to a general where you're supposed to go. And I
gotta be honest with you, when they open that door,
like your home just like disappears almost immediately because it's
so gloomy and so cold, and in all honesty, it
(28:20):
felt like death. It just felt like you were surrounded
by death. Rich I want you to know that there
are a lot of good people who are out of
here pulling for you more than you even know. And
so you ended up exhausting all of your appeals with
substandard representation who never did any of the necessary investigation
(28:40):
into your case. So predictably you had more of the
same results, which brings us to your clemency proceedings back
in two thousand fourteen, which turned out to be just
as big of a fiasco as my trials did. I
was turned down for crimacy, and the reason being is
not only was there a prosecutor from my case on
the board, Bob Macy's son was as well. And when
(29:03):
we robbed to their attentions after Hi Bob was denied Clemacy,
the Clemacy boyd claimed that they had no idea that
she had been a prosecutor on my case. Did she
not remember? She knew me really well? And Bob Macy's
son is there as well. Yeah, still has something to
do with the billboard today. I'm rarely at a loss
(29:24):
for words, but that is just ridiculous. I know, why
don't we have anybody that had anything to do with
Bob maybe or his office on a parole board that
deals with that's row inmates. So your clemency was denied,
but you didn't take that sitting down. In October twenty four,
I started this campaign. I was writing letters, hundreds of
(29:47):
letters to everybody. I wrote letters to John McCain, who
answered me, by the way, who I became friends with,
and he introduced my case to people here in Oklahoma
like Tom Koger and others who set up for me
back then. So, while Richard was fighting for his life,
other significant events work foot concerning the way in which
the state planned to kill him and others. Lethal injection.
(30:09):
Lethal injection, as a method of state sanctioned murder, consists
of three drugs, a sedative, which depresses the nervous system
and renders the person unconscious, next, a paralytic which provides
skeletal and muscular relaxation as well as depresses respiration, and finally,
a potassium solution which causes cardiac arrest. The most common
(30:30):
lethal injection drug combination is for the sedative sodium, theopental
or pentobarbital, then pancyronium bromide as the paralytic, and finally
potassium chloride, which causes the heart attack. In two thousand eleven,
some American pharma companies halted production of sodium theopental, and
the European Union enacted a torture regulation that banned the
(30:52):
export of drugs for the use of lethal injections, starting
with sodium theopental and later pental barbital so By two
thousand fourteen, states were experiencing a shortage of the necessary drugs,
which affected their ability to carry out death sentences according
to protocol, Oklahoma began looking for alternatives like medazzo lem
in place of sodium theo pental. Following this change, the
(31:16):
forty three minute long botched execution of Clayton Lockett on
April nine, two thousand and fourteen. Another death row inmate,
Charles Warner, awaited the same fate that night, just steps
away from the death chamber, but as a result of
the horror of Locketts execution, Warners was delayed. After an investigation,
(31:37):
Oklahoma blamed an inability to find Locketts veins as the
cause of the botched execution and decided to continue with
the same drug protocol involving Medazzo lem as a sedative
prompting Richard, Charles Warner, and nineteen others to sue Oklahoma,
and eventually they took the case all the way to
the Supreme Court the United States. While this was being litigated,
(32:00):
Richard's clemency was denied and his campaign from death row
was just beginning. He got in touch with renowned death
penalty abolition as Sister Helen Prejean. With his first execution
date and warners looming in January two thou fifteen, So
in late he calls Sister Helen, or he sends her
(32:20):
a letter and says, hey, sister Helen, you know, will
you be with me when they kill me? And she
looks into the case a little bit and then she
calls me. And I got together with another lawyer named
Mark Olive who does a lot of state habeas work.
And by now we're out of options. I mean there's
no court appearances left, clemency has been done. Basically, we're
out of options. At this point in time, rich comes
(32:43):
up for an execution date. So Oklahoma sets the date
for January fifteen, and a lot of people don't know this,
but in Oklahoma and other states, a period of real
psychological torture begins prior to execution. Now, I was taken upstairs.
They take you up thirty five days prior to your execution.
(33:04):
You have to sit in this room that is so
brightly lit for twenty four hours a day. Lights never
go off so bright that I can see a tiny
ant walking across a dark and gray floor. That's how
bright that rum is. You're on camera seven, and you
have a guard sitting outside your door. Seven. You can't
(33:25):
cover your head, you can't do any of that. This
is what people have to endure in Oklahoma before they're executed.
While he and Warner awaited death, the suit continued in litigation,
and on January fifteen, the group of condemned prisoners petition
the U. S. Supreme Court for a writ of certier
ari and stays of their executions. As evidenced by other
(33:47):
botched executions in Ohio and Arizona. The petitioners argued that
the medazzalem would not numb the pain that would be
caused by the other two drugs, so on January the
lead petitioner, Charles Warner, was denied a stay and executed
later that day over the descent of four justices, leaving
Richard as the next in line. Sister Helen and a
(34:09):
bunch of people were there visiting me. It was the
day before I'm supposed to be executed. It was funny
because Sister Helen came like I've seen her head like
moving up and down in the crowd, and she gave
me the phone and it was the Vatican. And I
got stock to the Vatican that day, and as soon
as I got done, the guards ran everybody out of there,
and hey, you've done the attorney call. So they set
me down and gave me the phone, and my attorney said,
(34:31):
the Supreme Court just gave you a stay and you
are now going to Supreme Court against lethal iningestion. Sister
Helen was able to mobilize a lot of people and
put some petitions together, and the Supreme Court, while they
didn't grant a stay for Charles Warner, based on basically
(34:51):
the same information on the leafal injection drug, granted rich
a stay and so he got to stay about twenty
four hours in advance of his first execut You should
date to have his case glossop feed growscope before the
United States Supreme Court, and so there was a whole
place on all executions in Oklahoma until the Rutling was made.
On June twenty nine, two fifteen, in the last day
(35:12):
of the Supreme Court's term, they ruled five to four
against Richard and the condemned prisoners, allowing Medazzalem as the sedative,
and Richard's execution date was set for September fifteen, two
thousand fifteen, so thirty five days prior the death ritual
began again. They actually move you to a cell that's
(35:32):
about four cells away from the actual death chamber, and
you're in that cell for a few days, and then
they bring you to the third cell, one closer to
the death chamber, and they leave you there for a
few days, and then they bring you to the second cell,
one more step closer to the death chamber, and then
they move you to the cell next to the death chamber.
(35:52):
And if if that's not torture in and of itself,
by the time you get to that final thing, you
can see the people coming and going from the death amber.
You know what's happening, you know what they're preparing, you
know what they're going to do. And rich was subject
to that for a long period of time. Because we
ended up with a stay of execution on September fifteen.
(36:13):
He had already been subjected to that, he had already
been brought to that final place. It was two hours
in advance of the execution that hit that the second
execution was stopped, and then they we had a two
weeks stay so that Rich was moved once again, just
back to where he had been and to and to
start that whole process over again. So Rich was subjected
to this incredible emotional torture in advance of the third
(36:36):
execution date, which was set for September. I was in
a lit room for fifty four straight days, no darkness whatsoever.
It's crazy what they put you through. They do mock
executions in front of you. I'm not trying to compare
(36:56):
Oklahoma to Isis, but it's no different than what ISIS
does to people. When they pulled somebody out and put
a sword to their neck, they act why they're gonna
chop their head off, And then they stopped and they say, oh,
we're gonna wait for another day, put them back in
this cell, you know. And then they put the guy
back in and bring him up the next day and
keep doing this. I mean, where do we draw the
(37:18):
line and tortured because this is tortured. My first date,
I gotta stay the day before my execution. The second
time I gotta stay hours before my execution. The third
time I got to stay after my execution was supposed
to have taken place. And these days came with a
lot of work done. So for the second one. On
(37:40):
September fifteenth, few fold motions presenting new evidence, including a
July nineties seven psyche evaluation showing Sneed was aware of
the charges against him and that he made no mention
of Richard, as well as the numerous people's Need confessed
to along the way that he had acted alone and
saved his own hide by implicating Richard. But despite all
(38:01):
of that, on September, Oklahoma Court of Criminal a Fields
voted three to two to proceed with the execution, and
the Supreme Court also denied a stay. Then the Governor
granted a stay on the citing that Oklahoma, contrary to
lethal injection drug protocol, had received potassium acetate, a freaking
(38:21):
food preservative, instead of potassium chloride for the cardiac arrest
inducing portion of the cocktail. So then Richard got a
thirty seven day stay to November six, two thousand fifteen.
And it was interesting when that happened because sister Helen
was outside the prison and she was saying, it's a
Richard gloss of preservative, because the drug day were going
to use was actually used as a preservative, you know.
(38:44):
But I think the scariest thing about that time was
when the governor at the time hold for a second
in command who was there google it. When we've gotten
to a point in a society, I where we google
how to execute people? Or is it okay to use
certain drugs that execute people that should just in the
(39:08):
destinity by itself. It makes no sense to me at
all that we entrust so many deeply flawed humans with
the machinery of death. But nevertheless, here we are. So
on October one, two thousand fifteen, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott
Prue had asked the Court of Criminal Appeals to issue
(39:29):
an indepthinite stay of all executions, citing the acquisition of
the wrong drugs. Then, on October eight, it was revealed
that Charles Warner had been killed using potassium acetate, the
food preservative, contrary to protocol D A. G. Prewitt then
ordered a multi county grand jury investigation, and this put
(39:52):
a hold on executions in Oklahoma. And with this moratorium,
the famous documentary and Joe burl and Or who made
Paradise Lost about the West Memphis Three, got involved to
help uncover more evidence and make the incredibly powerful docuseries
Killing Richard Glossop that we've been referencing. I'm Joe Burlinger,
(40:14):
and I guess they've been talking about my docuseries Killing
Richard Glossop. I mean, this case, to me is the
very definition of why there should be no death penalty,
and it just demonstrates how easily innocent people can be
put to death. This was a spontaneous act of a
opportunistic robbery that went awry, and all the evidence suggests that,
(40:35):
and no evidence points to Richard Glossop, even the fact
that when they found money on each of them, the
fact that there was blood on you know, the two
thousand dollars that Sneed had in his pocket, and Richard's
money had no blood on it. Here, you have a
murder for higher plot. And yet he himself justin Sneed
says in his original statement, and he said it again
(40:58):
to me when I interviewed him, that he never really
intended to kill Barry van Trees, He just was hoping
to kind of immobilize him. Well, then, how is it
a murder for Higher Plot? I mean, that very basic
fact makes it impossible to believe his story. So the
one thing that's Need has been consistent about is that
(41:21):
he never meant to kill Barry van Trees. So through
his own repeated admissions, he denies Rich's involvement. Rich was
supposed to have ordered him, remember, according to the state,
to rob and kill Barry. But if he never intended
to kill Barry, then he could not have been operating
under Rich's authority. Therefore, there was no murder for Higher Plot.
(41:46):
Richard could never have been involved. I mean, which, Justine Sneed,
are we supposed to believe the Sneed who says Richard
told me to do it so I had to do it,
or the Sneed who never intended to kill Barry ventres
to despite the alleged quote unquote orders of Richard Closset.
He can't be both. Not that any of this matters
(42:08):
to our legal processes, as actual innocence does not entitle
one to relief. According to the United States Supreme Court.
So don where do we stand now? So we've got
several new witnesses, people that nobody has ever heard. We
know the story now, we heard it from Sneet's mouth
through at least two or three witnesses. We know what
(42:31):
happened in this case, and we know that Rich didn't
have anything to do with this murder at all. And
so we are ready to go to the pardner in
Parole Board with this new information. We would go to court,
but we've already been to court in we lost there.
There are procedural bars that are in place to keep
(42:51):
us from even getting a chance to fairly litigate this
innocence again. So right now the state of Oklahoma is
set to once again begin the process of killing people.
There is an end to the current lawsuit that's going
on with Rich's name on it. Again. It's the success
of a gloss of be gross And once the court
(43:14):
makes a ruling on the protocol that they know how
to kill somebody with whatever drug they use, they're going
to go ahead and begin to set dates once again.
And we don't know if Rich will be first. He
doesn't have to be first, but he was last up
it's it's entirely possible that he will be the first
one set for execution, and that could take place sometime
(43:35):
in the late summer. The worst case scenario, they could
set a date on July one. I don't even know
what to say anymore. His fate has essentially been determined
barring action from the Pearl Board and the Executive branch,
but his legal faith has been sealed because of technical considerations.
(43:59):
We had two judges who, based upon the evidence we
had then, which is a shadow of the evidence that
we have now at that point in time, two judges
said we want to give this guy a hearing on
his innocence claim, but three judges said we won't, simply
because of finality of judgment. That was their whole point.
That's the Court's point is we can't let this go
(44:20):
on forever. We're going to stop it. Like you said,
innocence doesn't matter. That's the legal posture that we face today.
Right that awful decision was Harrara versus Collins, where the
Supreme Court said what I just said, evidence of innocence
is not enough to stop the wheels of justice from turning,
(44:41):
and in this case turning right into a state sponsored
murder of an innocent man named Richard Glass. I'm asking
everybody to go to say Richard Glass dot com to
sign the petitions that we have, but also participate in
everything that we're doing to try to bring justice reform
so that we can prevent this from happening to to
other people. This isn't always about one person, and that's
(45:02):
what I've always tried to make clear to people. This
is about many innocent people who are facing what I'm facing,
and I don't want them to face it. I don't
want them to go through what I went through. We
got to stand up as a as a society. We
have to stand up as a people. We have to
stand up and say, hey, we're not going to tolerate
this anymore. We've got to change this. We got to
prevent innocent bunity have been executed, and we got to
(45:25):
open people's eyes to why this is such a barbaric
practice and why it should no longer take place. Go
to save Richard glossip dot com. We'll also have links
in the bio for action steps that you can take,
and you know, with that, I want to turn it
over to YouTube. Guys. Thank you for being here. With
(45:46):
us today and spreading the word about this awful injustice.
And now we turn to what we call closing arguments.
This is a section of the show where I turned
my microphone off, take back in my chair, leave my
headphones on, close my eyes, and just listen to whatever
you have to say that we may have left out,
(46:08):
or anything you want to share with our audience. So Richard,
we're going to save you for last and let don
go first. And again, Richard, I just want you to
know we're all out here thinking about you. So many
people are praying for you, and we hope to see
you free before too long. Over to you. Done well,
(46:29):
Thank you, Jason. I really appreciate you taking the time
to shine a light on this terrible case and this
terrible injustice that we are hoping to stop with with
a hearing later this year. Richard Glossop, simple guy who
was in love with a young woman. Richard loved his
job at the best budget in loved Barry van tres
(46:49):
They had a great relationship. Rich never took any money
from Barry van Tresse and very respected Rich And a
terrible murder took place that rich did not have anything
at all to do with and the wheels of justice
began to turn in Oklahoma City the way that they
did back in those days with Bob Macy, and those
(47:09):
wheels just simply ran over Richard Blossop. He was a
victim of very very poor lawyering, of over aggressive police work,
of over aggressive prosecutors who only cared about one thing,
and that was getting a conviction and getting a death sentence,
because that was the culture of Oklahoma City at the time.
(47:30):
Through a series of three letters two the current District Attorney,
David Prator, we have requested a lot of substantive information
that we believe would prove that rich Glossop had nothing
to do with this, and we have received no answers.
We continue to wait for David Prator. So at this
(47:51):
point in time, we are we're preparing for a clembency
hearing that we know we'll take place later this year,
and we are hoping that people will go to say
Richard Assip dot com. You can find a petition there
to the governor and the partner in Pearol Board letting
those people know that this is wrong, what's what's happening,
and that the only way to write it is to
grant rich clemency and to allow us to get back
(48:13):
into court again. What do you rich Um? You know,
when I walked in and took that first step on
aging it on death row, I said that I have
two choices. I can make peace with death or I
can let it destroy me. And so I made peace
with death right then and there, and I just said,
I'm not gonna let it destroy me. I'm gonna be
(48:34):
the same person I was and I am to this day.
I singing my cell out loud, I laugh, I danced around,
and guards are always freaking out because I'm the way
that I am. And I told them, I said, you know,
I was a happy guy my whole life, and I'm
not going to let this change who I am because
we only have one life to live and it's a gift.
(48:55):
And I'm going to celebrate life no matter where the
hell I'm at, even in this hole, I'm going to
celebrate life. I've heard so many stories about people who
lost it down on un and I've seen it for myself.
I've witnessed it myself. And there are a lot of
people with serious mental health issues because you're isolated for
years and years and years and and it's yeah, it's hard,
(49:17):
and thankfully I you know, I had my art. I've
written songs. I've written so many poems. I've written a
book which I can't wait to get get out there
to people because it's a book of hope. It's a
book of showing people that you you do have more
strengthen you know, and you can take your courage and
you can move forward and you can have hope at
the end. And I described the three execution attempt. I
(49:38):
describe everything because I want people to know no matter
how bad things yet there's always something good that will
come from the worst situations you face in life. You
just gotta fight for it and you've got to make
sure it happens. So it's we're in a fight. Um,
we're in a big fight with legislators and people in
(49:59):
the state of Oklahoma. We're standing up saying we need
to prevent this and and hopefully we can succeed because
I do have a lot more like the lifts, and
I do have a lot more battle to raise. Again,
the destinility look at like what's happening here in Oklahoma,
one of the biggest Republican states in the in the country.
And you have Republicans now staying and up saying we're
(50:19):
not going to tolerate this anymore. We're not gonna kill
innocent people. I'm proud of Legislator make Google and Legislator Humphrey,
and you know, even the local businessman Justin Jackson. I'm
really proud of these people because they're diehard conservative and
yet they're standing us for innocence because it's not a
left thing, and it's not a right thing. It's an
innocent thing. And we've got to stop using politics in
(50:44):
justice reform. We all want the right things. If we don't,
then then you shouldn't be an office. We all want fair,
we all want justice, and that's why I've always said
that take the blindfold off of Lady Justice, because that's
one of the things. It's always weirded me out over
the years, as you're saying, well, she's finefold folders that
she could be fair. How can you be fair if
you can't see what's going on? So take the fine
(51:07):
fold awful lettera see what's going on and she'll see
alfair of justice. Really isn't that country. Thank you for
listening to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam. Please support your
local innocence projects and go to the link in our
bio to see how you can help. I'd like to
(51:28):
thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Clyburne and Kevin Wardens.
The music on the show, as always, is by three
time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow
us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at
Wrongful Conviction. Podcast. Wrangful Conviction with Jason Flam is a
production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal
(51:49):
Company Number one
Richard Glossop was the manager of a Cede motel in
Oklahoma City called the Best Budget in where he was
responsible for large sums of cash belonging to its owner,
Barry Van Trees, cash that he could have stolen at
any time without violence. A traveling roofer and meth addict
named Justin Snee began staying at the motel in exchange
for maintenance work, while enjoying easy access to the drugs
(00:24):
and prostitutes one might find at a CD motel. In
the early morning of January seven, Stead and a girlfriend
lured Barry van Trees into Room one O two to
rob him of the cash he was known to carry.
Barry resisted and was bludgeoned at stabbed to death. His
car was moved to a nearby lot. Later that morning,
(00:46):
sneyed off handedly told Richard that he had killed Barry,
but after seeing that Barry's car was not at its
usual spot, Richard dismissed what he thought was Sneed's usual
drug adult ramblings. When the body was discovered, Richard told
police about what Sneed had said, causing them to focus
on him. Even though Sneed eventually confessed, police steered him
(01:07):
to implicate Richard as the mastermind of a murder for
higher scheme. For his testimony, Sneed escaped the death penalty
in exchange for life without parole, swapping Richard into his place.
The word of a meth head and alleged motive to
steal cash was all. It took. Twenty four years, two trials,
three stays of execution, a lethal injection drug scandal, and
(01:30):
two Supreme Court cases later, Richard remains a death row
in Oklahoma. This is wrongful Conviction with Jason Flopper. Welcome
(01:53):
back to wrongful conviction with Jason flomm That's me. And
if I sound a little down today, it's because this
case Ace that you're going to hear about is one
of the most troubling cases I've ever heard of in
my now twenty ninth year of doing this type of work.
With us today we have one of the respected, even
(02:16):
revered criminal and civil defense attorneys, a man named Don Knight.
Welcome to ronfle Conviction. Thank you, Jason. I appreciate that,
and of course with us today calling in from the
Oklahoma State Penitentiary where he is now in his twenty
third year on death row. And that is of course
(02:37):
Richard Gloss. Hello, this is a collect call from and
incarcerated individual at Oklahoma State Penitentiary. This call is not private.
This call will be recorded and may be monitored. To
consent to this recorded call, press one to disconnect. Thank
you for using securance. You may start the conversation now. Hello, Richard.
(03:00):
I'm sorry you're here under these circumstances, but I'm happier here.
Oh that's cool. That's cool. Twenty four years of this
and uh, it's been a long battle and it just continues.
But the good thing is I'm still here. Richard, you
don't mind take us back to your childhood. Use that
sort of an unusual childhood and moved from Illinois to Oklahoma.
But also, you were one of a lot of children, right,
(03:22):
You had a lot of brothers and sisters. Yeah. And
I actually grew up in Gillsborge, Illinois. There was sixteen
of us. There was eight boys and eight girls. You know,
I grew up around a lot of addiction and stuff
like that, and you know, I just didn't think I
was going to get anywhere if I stayed there any longer.
And left home when I was fourteen and just made
it on my own. You know, it's actually kind of
a miracle that you survived. I mean, we could do
(03:45):
a whole podcast about that alone, but your story hadn't
even begun yet. So okay, you were strange from your
family for many years, working and getting by. But how
did you end up in Oklahoma where you got a
job at the best budget in working for Barry Van Trees.
My mom and dad retired and they decided to move
(04:06):
out here to Oklahoma to be closer to my mom's family,
and my dad's health was selling and my mom asked
me if I would come out here in some times
with my dad, and that's how I ended up with
the best budget in. Barry Van Tresse didn't just run
the best budget in Oklahoma City, he also ran best
budget in in Tulsa. These were really low rent motels.
(04:30):
They were a cash business. There was a lot of
drug activity and prostitution. Barry Van trest would come by
every couple of weeks to the Oklahoma City Best Budget
in where he would pick up the cash from Rich.
Rich would have sometimes up to thirty dollars in receipts
depending on how long it took for Van Trees to
come by. The motel. So Rich was constantly handling large
(04:54):
amounts of money, and there was never any question about
whether Rich was stealing money. He was not steal anything
at all, right, And if he wanted to steal the money,
he could have done so almost any time without violence,
and he could have skipped down. But he never did,
and certainly he didn't do so by involving a math
head named Justin Snead. Now Justin had come through town
with a roof and crew out of Texas, and while
(05:16):
he was staying at the best budget in he worked
out a deal for a free room and exchange for
a maintenance and other work around the motel. Right, yes,
I said, hey, I need you to go take care
of this, or he needs to take these people from
toils or whatever the case. Maybe he always did it,
but as time went by, he was getting harder to
find him, and I was gonna let him go a
couple of times, but you know, very like the fact
(05:37):
that he was working beru but very good moment to
let him goes. But towards all this happening, in the end,
it was like I hardly ever found him to do
what he was supposed to do. Did you catch any
signs that he was using math, Well, they were up
all the time. So I did have a couple of
family members that did it, and so learning from how
(05:58):
they acted, you know, I could tell that, yeah, definitely
they want something. Justin was a very odd guy. He
would say things that would throw you off. He would
say things that would just make you scratch your head
and gold Man, this guy is just like really weird.
So were there any signs that he might have been
robbing people to support his habit? Yeah, you know, I
have one of the guy named John Biebers came to
(06:20):
me and that that he was missing a big jar
of coins. When he said he thought Justin did it,
I didn't believe him, but hindsight right, Yeah, it sure is.
And at the time, you and your girlfriend Diana would
were spending a lot of time together and most of
it at the motel. Yeah. I lived on the property.
I lived behind the front desk in an apartment, so
I'm always on the property other than like Dena and
(06:42):
I've been able to go out and do something on
our own. Why the death work was there? Now? This
brings us all the way up to January seven, at
six am. Justin sneed woke Rich up and told him
about a broken window and then kind of off handily says, oh,
and by the way, I killed Barry. Now, Snead was
known for saying weird stuff like that, and so when
(07:03):
Richard looked at Barry's usual parking spot and didn't see
Barry's car, he wrote it off as Sneed just being sneaed. Now,
later on, Barry van tress car was spotted in the
Credit Union parking lot, about fifty yards away from the
best budget in but there was no sign of Barry.
So this kicked off a search, and rich was out
shopping with his Girlfrienddianna and was called back to work
(07:24):
around three pm. So at this point rich is wondering
do I tell the police about what Sneed said, but
he Indiana decided against it because they didn't even know
if Barry was dead or not, And finally at ten pm,
Barry's body was discovered in room one oh two. He
had been beaten with a baseball bat as well as
having been stabbed with a blunt object. What happened here
(07:48):
was that Barry van Trese stopped in in the evening
of January six, took care of payroll and took care
of everybody at the Best Budget in Oklahoma City before
leaving and driving Tulsa to take care of of the
payroll and the situation in Tulsa. He didn't get to
Tulsa till around midnight or so, and didn't stay there
(08:10):
very long, told the people and Tulsa, and he left
to tell his wife that he would be home in
five and a half hours. Home was Lawton, Oklahoma. It
doesn't take five and a half hours to get to Lawton,
so obviously, when he said that he had plans to stop,
he stopped back at the Best Budget in in Oklahoma
City where he went to room one oh two, and
(08:33):
that's where Justin Sneed was waiting for him, or at
least his girlfriend was waiting for him. Because we have
found out that there was another person involved in this case.
It wasn't Rich Glossop, but it was Justin Sneed's girlfriend.
The information that we have found is that it was
simply a robbery attempt. These two meth fueled young people
(08:58):
thought they could simply take the keys from Barry Van
Trese and get the money out of his car without
Van Trese knowing or objecting. I don't know what their
plan was. We talked to one witness and she had
a great statement. She said, when you've been on mess
for twenty days in a row, the idea fairy appears.
(09:20):
That looks like what happened here. These two people knew
Barry Ventres had a lot of money, and so we
think that he was lured into room one o two
by this girl. He knew he was coming back to
that place, and once they're confronted by Justin Snead. From
the information we have that we have found from new witnesses,
(09:41):
Snead admitted that he was intending simply to take Van
Trese's money and not kill him. But Van Trese fought back,
and at the end of that fight, Barry van Trese
was beaten to death. It wasn't just beaten to death,
but there was also some stab wounds on his body
from a very blunt object. And the blunt object appears
(10:01):
to be a pocket knife that the police found in
the motel room that had its tip broken off. So
for this murder, Justin Sneed and his girlfriend had two weapons,
a baseball bat and a broken knife. That would be
really low on anyone's choices of how to go right,
(10:22):
um sure, But also I think low on somebody's idea
of how to kill somebody. I mean, if you're really
planning to murder someone, you don't go with a dull
knife in a baseball bat. You know. It sounds like
a bad plan from mess fueled young people, and the
aftermath was a continuation of that bad plan. The vehicle
(10:43):
where the money was was moved not more than fifty yards,
not as if it was moved away so that it
could be hidden. It was within plain view of the
best budget in in a credit union, right next to
the best budget in. It was found there the next
morning by the security guard off duty Sheriff's deputy working
(11:04):
at the way Yoke credit Union found this vehicle sort
of with one tire up on the curb, parked in
a place that it shouldn't be parked, and that's what
started the investigation on the seventh into Barry Van Tresea's death.
So you might notice that Rich hasn't been mentioned yet
in the story of this crime, and that's because no one,
(11:25):
not even the prosecution, ever claimed that he was even
in the room when it happened. Rich was sleeping in
the apartment behind the front desk with his girlfriend. That's undisputed.
So why are we even having this conversation and how
is Rich on death row? Well, the lead investigators in
this case BMLINKOK, who did little to no investigation, basically
(11:49):
didn't talk to anyone at the motel and instead focused
on Richard early on. For a few very ill conceived reasons.
They focused on Rich and I think the first reason
is Rich's last name is Gloss. Rich's family was a
known family with a criminal history in Oklahoma, So I
think that's one thing. That The second thing when they
(12:11):
found Vantres's body at ten o'clock and they said, you know, Rich,
why don't you come in and sit and talk with us?
And it was at that point that Rich told them
about that statement that Snead made. That was the point
I think when the police said, oh, well, he's hiding something.
And I think that, in combination with Rich's last name,
(12:33):
I think that's what made the police begin to think
Rich Gloss have had something to do with this case.
They decide to focus on this one statement that he omitted, right,
which is I don't know that I would have done
anything differently myself. It's clearly his right to do so.
I mean, he doesn't have to talk to the police.
(12:54):
Nobody has to talk to the police. After this initial interview,
on the seventh, Rich sells some personal I was to
raise money for a lawyer and talk to an attorney
named David Mackenzie, who told him quite rightly to not
speak with the police. But Rich did what a lot
of innocent people do, right. He believed that just telling
the truth will set you free, so he talked to
(13:16):
Demo and Cook. Anyway, in the parking lot of Mackenzie's office,
the police were waiting for Rich. Rather than tell them
I can't talk to you because this lawyer just told
me this is what I'm supposed to say, Rich says, okay,
I'll talk to you. And Demo and Cook have a
real bad history of how they do their interrogations, and
(13:40):
when they set themselves upon Rich, they were going to
do what they could do to try to get Rich
to say things that they could say, We're inconsistent, and
then they would start driving that home to try to
get him to confess to this crime. But he never
does confess to the crime. However, they start trying to
(14:00):
tell him that he said things in his initial interview
on the seventh that he did not. They tried to
catch him in lies with lies of their own, and
it's clear that they have their sights set on him. Meanwhile,
Snee took off on the afternoon of the seventh, before
Barry's body was even found. He went off working with
(14:20):
the roof and crew that he came into town with
from Texas, trying to make himself scarce. Basically, yeah, he
left new motel sometime after three o'clock, just took a
skateboard and took off again. It was it's something that
the prosecutor in both trials tried to paint that he
was totally dependent on Glossip for everything because he had
no way of making any money, which was just wrong.
(14:42):
I mean, first off, he was stealing the place blind
he was, he was breaking into motel rooms, he was
breaking into cars, he was doing everything he could do
to get money for his drug habit. But when he
left the motel that day, he skateboarded over to where
the people who he used to work for doing roofing
were and he joined the roofing crew again. So he
(15:06):
had the opportunity at any point in time to go
make more money doing his roofing work than he ever
made it the best budget in and he did that
on that day. They didn't catch Snead until the fourteenth
of January. It was the owner of the roofing company
who seeing the news accounts of what had happened and
seeing Sneed's picture on the news, that said to Snead,
(15:27):
I think you need to turn yourself in. So he's
the one that called the police, and that's when they
interrogated Sneed, right, and it sneeds interrogation. It's clear that
Rich is their main target, so they start working Snead
over to both admit to the crime and implicate Rich
in some way. Yeah, this was not a situation where
they were saying, okay, justin we've we've caught you, why
don't you tell us what happened. Instead, they go through
(15:49):
this long prelude telling him what happened, telling him what
they know, telling him that they know that somebody else
was involved and they don't want him to hang alone.
And in Sneeds first is like, I don't even know
what to say. I don't want to tell you, as
if he didn't have anything to do with it, And
then they brought Rich's name into it. We think Rich
had something to do with it. You know, he's under arrest.
So Snead never said anything about glossip at all. That
(16:12):
came from the police and then they began to work
with Snead from there until they finally got this sort
of crazy idea about Rich wanting to steal the money,
killed Van Trees and split the money with Snead and
somehow or another they would run the motels. Some crazy
story that that came out, which I think you would
(16:34):
probably expect from somebody who's high on math, right and
who's being fed information by police who are exactly not
interested in the truth here. Um so, because if they
had been interested in the truth, they simply what I said,
want to tell us what happened, tell us everything that
you know. And so Snead confesses to the murder. But
what's clear from his interrogation is that he was steered
(16:56):
to drag Rich into it as the mastermind of a
murder for higher plot, and then Snead uses this made
up scenario to save himself, making a deal for a
life without parole instead of the death penalt. We have
a witness who says he talked to Snead that year
while he was in jail with Sneed and a. Snead said,
(17:17):
I had two main goals. One I didn't want the
death penalty, and too I didn't want my girlfriend to
get caught. Snead got bold of what he wanted at
Rich's expense. This episode is underwritten by Paul Weiss Rifkin,
(17:42):
Wharton and Garrison. A leading international law fer. Paul Weiss
has long had an unwavering commitment to providing impactful, pro
bono legal assistance to the most vulnerable members of our
society and in support of the public interest, including extensive
work in the criminal justice area. Detective Demo in the
(18:08):
docuseries That Was Done changed what he testified the two trials,
saying that it was a murder for hire. He gets
a statement in our docuseries where he says, Oh, I
think it was a robbery went bad. That's the original
story that Justin gave him, that it was a robbery
went bad, and they knew that that's what it was,
but they needed it to be more. In my opinion,
(18:28):
you know, prosecutors and stuff need these notches in their
belts so bad so they could further their career. And
it doesn't matter who they get that notch from, as
long as they get it. My first judge, Judge Johnson,
even even looked at the prosecutor and said, I don't
understand where this is the murder case. And she convinced
(18:49):
the judge will give me some time. And that's the
only reason the judge even allowed to go forward, because
he was convinced by a prosecutor to let her build
a case. Oh so, don there is a villain in
this story, of course, I'm talking about then district attorney
Bob Macy, who was nicknamed the Angel of Death and
(19:11):
he seemed to get off unwinning death penalty cases, innocent, guilty, whatever.
Um he played dress up like a cowboy, although he
was not a cowboy. Can you tell us about this
this awful character, Bob Macy is just one of a
handful of prosecuting attorneys in the country that really drives
(19:35):
that the death penalty in in this country, they're only
a handful of places where most of the death penalty
verdicts come from. At least that has been the way
in the past. New Orleans, there was certainly one in
Oklahoma City. And these prosecutors, they derive their power. I
think and and their their political base from seeking and
(19:56):
getting the death penalty. They look at that as being
tough on crime, and Macy certainly forged his legacy with
all of that in mind. I think the thing that
happens in these places is it can't just be one
person that does this, but it becomes a culture. He
was in power in Oklahoma City for a long time.
(20:19):
A lot of his prosecutors went on to become judges.
So now you've got not just the prosecuting attorney's office,
but they're on the bench as well. So they've got judges, prosecutors,
forensic people, you've got police, and you've got jurors who
are are just ready to go on these death penalty cases.
And they begin to sort of cow the defense bar
(20:42):
into either going along and getting their clients some kind
of plea or they lose at trial, and and these
death verdicts result. It becomes a cultural situation where you
have no one fighting anymore for the defendant, and this
sort of get on the train, get run over by
the trained mentality takes over. So Rich is charged with
(21:04):
capital murder, which the fact that he's being tried for
his life for not having killed anyone is insane in
and of itself. But that's a totally another story. And
so a trial snead testified that Rich was the mastermind
behind this murder for higher plot, thereby receiving the direct
benefit of not being sent to death row himself. I
(21:25):
feel like this should have been easy to beat. So
Rich had a terrible lawyer, guy named Wayne Faunerot. In
the first trial, he never I don't even know if
he ever tried a case before. He was completely incompetent
and put on no witnesses, didn't know how to cross
examine anybody. Basically, the case when exactly as the prosecutors
(21:47):
wanted it to go, and Rich was sentenced to death.
Baigner Rot had no idea how to do a penalty
phase in a death case. He didn't do any investigation.
I mean, Rich was a guy without a criminal history
at all. I mean, you were talking about the death
penalty in the United States. You're you're supposedly talking about
the worst of the worst. Well, Rich had never committed
a crime before. How could he possibly be the worst
(22:09):
of the worst. Is this crime bad? Yes? Is it
the worst crime ever? No, it's not the worst crime ever.
So he doesn't fit that category at all, and yet,
because of the way things were in Oklahoma at the time,
they were able to get a conviction and a death sentence.
Right So, was Rich convicted solely on the basis of
(22:29):
the testimony of a murderous meth head or was there
some sort of other evidence offered a trial? I would
answer the question in both ways. Yes, no question. It
was really all about what Snead said, and he said
very many different things at different times. He initially told
the police that Glossip told him to kill Van Tres
(22:53):
and rob him of somewhere around five thousand dollars and
they would split it. But by the time the first
trial rolled around, Snead added things like Rich told me
to go buy some meriadic acid because we were going
to melt the body and I wasn't able to do that.
So Snead had a variety of stories that ultimately came
(23:13):
out that just simply shows that he was not telling
the truth. He was never consistent with anything that he said,
and the prosecutor had to sort of cobble together what
the Court of Appeals would later call corroborating evidence that
was really really weak. From the standpoint of corroborating evidence.
They had put together a spreadsheet and an allegation that
(23:34):
Rich was stealing money, that somehow or another, the Vantry's
family knew he was stealing money and that they were
about to fire him, and Rich knew he was about
to be fired, and so that formed the motive for
Rich to do this killing. There is no real evidence
of that. We took a look at that spreadsheet, which
by the way, no one did until we got involved
(23:56):
in this case. We have to forensic accountants who looked
at it and they said, the idea that Rich was
stealing money based upon the information that we see is crazy.
So after his first conviction, Rich took his case to
the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, who called the evidence
against him extremely weak. And the Oklahoma Quarter Criminal Appeals
(24:18):
looked at the job that Wayne Faunerott did and said
this can't be okay, and they, in a unanimous verdict
which never happens on direct appeal, threw it back and
said he gets a new trial. Right. So the second
trial rolls around and Oklahoma is not done with their
dirty tricks. And you know what I'm talking about, the
way that they managed to remove an attorney who was
(24:41):
prepared to probably win this case and right this wrong.
This lawyer was the appellate lawyer for Rich, a guy
named Lynn Birch, did a great job getting the case
tossed out on appeal, decided to keep it, and was
working the case leading up to this second trial when
(25:01):
he made an error, and that is going to see
Justin Sneed the night before the trial began. They think
Lynn Birch was looking to see if there was some
way that that Snead would simply come clean and tell
the truth. The air that Lynn Burch made was not
taking an investigator with him, not taking a third party.
Because when he showed up in court the next morning,
(25:22):
the prosecutor said, Judge, we've got a problem. Lynn Burch
was threatening our witness and was harassing Justin Snead. Rather
than fight that, which I think Burch should have done,
he should have said, I didn't do anything like that.
I never said anything wrong. Let me tell you what
I told him. Put me on the witness stand, put
Sneed on the witness stand. Let's have it out. Birch
(25:42):
simply said, you know, okay, you know, I probably screwed
up in there, and he left the case the morning
of trial, which caused a six month extension. But with
Birch gone, it left it in the hands of two
lawyers who were not prepared for the trial, and he
did very little. And the lead up to the next trial,
they did no investigation, They put on no witnesses, Their
(26:05):
cross examinations were horrible. They allowed the prosecution to run
wild with leading questions. Basically, the kids were greased and
the and the prosecution just got their case through like
they wanted. In the second trial, it was really strange
because the prosecutor came into the courtroom, she looked at
the jury and she goes, I have no evidence against
Richard Glad just justin sneeded. So now it becomes who
(26:29):
you're going to believe. Every witness had new testimony, who
when they were asked or you didn't remember it the
day it happened, but you remember seven years later, and
they would sit there and say, the prosecutor helped us remember.
As a result, the results were predictable, which is that
in August two thousand, for another Oklahoma jury found Richard
(26:51):
guilty and Richard gets sentenced to death. Again. It's strange
how you go through your whole life doing what's right,
thinking that you know, if you tell the truth and
then everything's gonna be okay. Um. And then you're you're
standing there when somebody says, you know, we find you
guilty of murder and you had nothing to do with
this time, and your just your mouth just falls open
(27:13):
and this feeling comes over. You're like, how can this
possibly be happening to me? This doesn't make sense. It's
one of the strangest feelings. It's really hard to put
into word, but it's just like every part of you
just goes now. It's like you're just in shock, and
you don't know, you don't even have a response to it.
(27:34):
You just stand there and you just like you just
can't even believe it. It's one of the most overwhelming
things I've ever had to face. Um. You know when
(27:57):
I walked in, Um, they take you to the main
gate up there, and they too in this little shack
whither you wait to get people to take you down
to a general where you're supposed to go. And I
gotta be honest with you, when they open that door,
like your home just like disappears almost immediately because it's
so gloomy and so cold, and in all honesty, it
(28:20):
felt like death. It just felt like you were surrounded
by death. Rich I want you to know that there
are a lot of good people who are out of
here pulling for you more than you even know. And
so you ended up exhausting all of your appeals with
substandard representation who never did any of the necessary investigation
(28:40):
into your case. So predictably you had more of the
same results, which brings us to your clemency proceedings back
in two thousand fourteen, which turned out to be just
as big of a fiasco as my trials did. I
was turned down for crimacy, and the reason being is
not only was there a prosecutor from my case on
the board, Bob Macy's son was as well. And when
(29:03):
we robbed to their attentions after Hi Bob was denied Clemacy,
the Clemacy boyd claimed that they had no idea that
she had been a prosecutor on my case. Did she
not remember? She knew me really well? And Bob Macy's
son is there as well. Yeah, still has something to
do with the billboard today. I'm rarely at a loss
(29:24):
for words, but that is just ridiculous. I know, why
don't we have anybody that had anything to do with
Bob maybe or his office on a parole board that
deals with that's row inmates. So your clemency was denied,
but you didn't take that sitting down. In October twenty four,
I started this campaign. I was writing letters, hundreds of
(29:47):
letters to everybody. I wrote letters to John McCain, who
answered me, by the way, who I became friends with,
and he introduced my case to people here in Oklahoma
like Tom Koger and others who set up for me
back then. So, while Richard was fighting for his life,
other significant events work foot concerning the way in which
the state planned to kill him and others. Lethal injection.
(30:09):
Lethal injection, as a method of state sanctioned murder, consists
of three drugs, a sedative, which depresses the nervous system
and renders the person unconscious, next, a paralytic which provides
skeletal and muscular relaxation as well as depresses respiration, and finally,
a potassium solution which causes cardiac arrest. The most common
(30:30):
lethal injection drug combination is for the sedative sodium, theopental
or pentobarbital, then pancyronium bromide as the paralytic, and finally
potassium chloride, which causes the heart attack. In two thousand eleven,
some American pharma companies halted production of sodium theopental, and
the European Union enacted a torture regulation that banned the
(30:52):
export of drugs for the use of lethal injections, starting
with sodium theopental and later pental barbital so By two
thousand fourteen, states were experiencing a shortage of the necessary drugs,
which affected their ability to carry out death sentences according
to protocol, Oklahoma began looking for alternatives like medazzo lem
in place of sodium theo pental. Following this change, the
(31:16):
forty three minute long botched execution of Clayton Lockett on
April nine, two thousand and fourteen. Another death row inmate,
Charles Warner, awaited the same fate that night, just steps
away from the death chamber, but as a result of
the horror of Locketts execution, Warners was delayed. After an investigation,
(31:37):
Oklahoma blamed an inability to find Locketts veins as the
cause of the botched execution and decided to continue with
the same drug protocol involving Medazzo lem as a sedative
prompting Richard, Charles Warner, and nineteen others to sue Oklahoma,
and eventually they took the case all the way to
the Supreme Court the United States. While this was being litigated,
(32:00):
Richard's clemency was denied and his campaign from death row
was just beginning. He got in touch with renowned death
penalty abolition as Sister Helen Prejean. With his first execution
date and warners looming in January two thou fifteen, So
in late he calls Sister Helen, or he sends her
(32:20):
a letter and says, hey, sister Helen, you know, will
you be with me when they kill me? And she
looks into the case a little bit and then she
calls me. And I got together with another lawyer named
Mark Olive who does a lot of state habeas work.
And by now we're out of options. I mean there's
no court appearances left, clemency has been done. Basically, we're
out of options. At this point in time, rich comes
(32:43):
up for an execution date. So Oklahoma sets the date
for January fifteen, and a lot of people don't know this,
but in Oklahoma and other states, a period of real
psychological torture begins prior to execution. Now, I was taken upstairs.
They take you up thirty five days prior to your execution.
(33:04):
You have to sit in this room that is so
brightly lit for twenty four hours a day. Lights never
go off so bright that I can see a tiny
ant walking across a dark and gray floor. That's how
bright that rum is. You're on camera seven, and you
have a guard sitting outside your door. Seven. You can't
(33:25):
cover your head, you can't do any of that. This
is what people have to endure in Oklahoma before they're executed.
While he and Warner awaited death, the suit continued in litigation,
and on January fifteen, the group of condemned prisoners petition
the U. S. Supreme Court for a writ of certier
ari and stays of their executions. As evidenced by other
(33:47):
botched executions in Ohio and Arizona. The petitioners argued that
the medazzalem would not numb the pain that would be
caused by the other two drugs, so on January the
lead petitioner, Charles Warner, was denied a stay and executed
later that day over the descent of four justices, leaving
Richard as the next in line. Sister Helen and a
(34:09):
bunch of people were there visiting me. It was the
day before I'm supposed to be executed. It was funny
because Sister Helen came like I've seen her head like
moving up and down in the crowd, and she gave
me the phone and it was the Vatican. And I
got stock to the Vatican that day, and as soon
as I got done, the guards ran everybody out of there,
and hey, you've done the attorney call. So they set
me down and gave me the phone, and my attorney said,
(34:31):
the Supreme Court just gave you a stay and you
are now going to Supreme Court against lethal iningestion. Sister
Helen was able to mobilize a lot of people and
put some petitions together, and the Supreme Court, while they
didn't grant a stay for Charles Warner, based on basically
(34:51):
the same information on the leafal injection drug, granted rich
a stay and so he got to stay about twenty
four hours in advance of his first execut You should
date to have his case glossop feed growscope before the
United States Supreme Court, and so there was a whole
place on all executions in Oklahoma until the Rutling was made.
On June twenty nine, two fifteen, in the last day
(35:12):
of the Supreme Court's term, they ruled five to four
against Richard and the condemned prisoners, allowing Medazzalem as the sedative,
and Richard's execution date was set for September fifteen, two
thousand fifteen, so thirty five days prior the death ritual
began again. They actually move you to a cell that's
(35:32):
about four cells away from the actual death chamber, and
you're in that cell for a few days, and then
they bring you to the third cell, one closer to
the death chamber, and they leave you there for a
few days, and then they bring you to the second cell,
one more step closer to the death chamber, and then
they move you to the cell next to the death chamber.
(35:52):
And if if that's not torture in and of itself,
by the time you get to that final thing, you
can see the people coming and going from the death amber.
You know what's happening, you know what they're preparing, you
know what they're going to do. And rich was subject
to that for a long period of time. Because we
ended up with a stay of execution on September fifteen.
(36:13):
He had already been subjected to that, he had already
been brought to that final place. It was two hours
in advance of the execution that hit that the second
execution was stopped, and then they we had a two
weeks stay so that Rich was moved once again, just
back to where he had been and to and to
start that whole process over again. So Rich was subjected
to this incredible emotional torture in advance of the third
(36:36):
execution date, which was set for September. I was in
a lit room for fifty four straight days, no darkness whatsoever.
It's crazy what they put you through. They do mock
executions in front of you. I'm not trying to compare
(36:56):
Oklahoma to Isis, but it's no different than what ISIS
does to people. When they pulled somebody out and put
a sword to their neck, they act why they're gonna
chop their head off, And then they stopped and they say, oh,
we're gonna wait for another day, put them back in
this cell, you know. And then they put the guy
back in and bring him up the next day and
keep doing this. I mean, where do we draw the
(37:18):
line and tortured because this is tortured. My first date,
I gotta stay the day before my execution. The second
time I gotta stay hours before my execution. The third
time I got to stay after my execution was supposed
to have taken place. And these days came with a
lot of work done. So for the second one. On
(37:40):
September fifteenth, few fold motions presenting new evidence, including a
July nineties seven psyche evaluation showing Sneed was aware of
the charges against him and that he made no mention
of Richard, as well as the numerous people's Need confessed
to along the way that he had acted alone and
saved his own hide by implicating Richard. But despite all
(38:01):
of that, on September, Oklahoma Court of Criminal a Fields
voted three to two to proceed with the execution, and
the Supreme Court also denied a stay. Then the Governor
granted a stay on the citing that Oklahoma, contrary to
lethal injection drug protocol, had received potassium acetate, a freaking
(38:21):
food preservative, instead of potassium chloride for the cardiac arrest
inducing portion of the cocktail. So then Richard got a
thirty seven day stay to November six, two thousand fifteen.
And it was interesting when that happened because sister Helen
was outside the prison and she was saying, it's a
Richard gloss of preservative, because the drug day were going
to use was actually used as a preservative, you know.
(38:44):
But I think the scariest thing about that time was
when the governor at the time hold for a second
in command who was there google it. When we've gotten
to a point in a society, I where we google
how to execute people? Or is it okay to use
certain drugs that execute people that should just in the
(39:08):
destinity by itself. It makes no sense to me at
all that we entrust so many deeply flawed humans with
the machinery of death. But nevertheless, here we are. So
on October one, two thousand fifteen, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott
Prue had asked the Court of Criminal Appeals to issue
(39:29):
an indepthinite stay of all executions, citing the acquisition of
the wrong drugs. Then, on October eight, it was revealed
that Charles Warner had been killed using potassium acetate, the
food preservative, contrary to protocol D A. G. Prewitt then
ordered a multi county grand jury investigation, and this put
(39:52):
a hold on executions in Oklahoma. And with this moratorium,
the famous documentary and Joe burl and Or who made
Paradise Lost about the West Memphis Three, got involved to
help uncover more evidence and make the incredibly powerful docuseries
Killing Richard Glossop that we've been referencing. I'm Joe Burlinger,
(40:14):
and I guess they've been talking about my docuseries Killing
Richard Glossop. I mean, this case, to me is the
very definition of why there should be no death penalty,
and it just demonstrates how easily innocent people can be
put to death. This was a spontaneous act of a
opportunistic robbery that went awry, and all the evidence suggests that,
(40:35):
and no evidence points to Richard Glossop, even the fact
that when they found money on each of them, the
fact that there was blood on you know, the two
thousand dollars that Sneed had in his pocket, and Richard's
money had no blood on it. Here, you have a
murder for higher plot. And yet he himself justin Sneed
says in his original statement, and he said it again
(40:58):
to me when I interviewed him, that he never really
intended to kill Barry van Trees, He just was hoping
to kind of immobilize him. Well, then, how is it
a murder for Higher Plot? I mean, that very basic
fact makes it impossible to believe his story. So the
one thing that's Need has been consistent about is that
(41:21):
he never meant to kill Barry van Trees. So through
his own repeated admissions, he denies Rich's involvement. Rich was
supposed to have ordered him, remember, according to the state,
to rob and kill Barry. But if he never intended
to kill Barry, then he could not have been operating
under Rich's authority. Therefore, there was no murder for Higher Plot.
(41:46):
Richard could never have been involved. I mean, which, Justine Sneed,
are we supposed to believe the Sneed who says Richard
told me to do it so I had to do it,
or the Sneed who never intended to kill Barry ventres
to despite the alleged quote unquote orders of Richard Closset.
He can't be both. Not that any of this matters
(42:08):
to our legal processes, as actual innocence does not entitle
one to relief. According to the United States Supreme Court.
So don where do we stand now? So we've got
several new witnesses, people that nobody has ever heard. We
know the story now, we heard it from Sneet's mouth
through at least two or three witnesses. We know what
(42:31):
happened in this case, and we know that Rich didn't
have anything to do with this murder at all. And
so we are ready to go to the pardner in
Parole Board with this new information. We would go to court,
but we've already been to court in we lost there.
There are procedural bars that are in place to keep
(42:51):
us from even getting a chance to fairly litigate this
innocence again. So right now the state of Oklahoma is
set to once again begin the process of killing people.
There is an end to the current lawsuit that's going
on with Rich's name on it. Again. It's the success
of a gloss of be gross And once the court
(43:14):
makes a ruling on the protocol that they know how
to kill somebody with whatever drug they use, they're going
to go ahead and begin to set dates once again.
And we don't know if Rich will be first. He
doesn't have to be first, but he was last up
it's it's entirely possible that he will be the first
one set for execution, and that could take place sometime
(43:35):
in the late summer. The worst case scenario, they could
set a date on July one. I don't even know
what to say anymore. His fate has essentially been determined
barring action from the Pearl Board and the Executive branch,
but his legal faith has been sealed because of technical considerations.
(43:59):
We had two judges who, based upon the evidence we
had then, which is a shadow of the evidence that
we have now at that point in time, two judges
said we want to give this guy a hearing on
his innocence claim, but three judges said we won't, simply
because of finality of judgment. That was their whole point.
That's the Court's point is we can't let this go
(44:20):
on forever. We're going to stop it. Like you said,
innocence doesn't matter. That's the legal posture that we face today.
Right that awful decision was Harrara versus Collins, where the
Supreme Court said what I just said, evidence of innocence
is not enough to stop the wheels of justice from turning,
(44:41):
and in this case turning right into a state sponsored
murder of an innocent man named Richard Glass. I'm asking
everybody to go to say Richard Glass dot com to
sign the petitions that we have, but also participate in
everything that we're doing to try to bring justice reform
so that we can prevent this from happening to to
other people. This isn't always about one person, and that's
(45:02):
what I've always tried to make clear to people. This
is about many innocent people who are facing what I'm facing,
and I don't want them to face it. I don't
want them to go through what I went through. We
got to stand up as a as a society. We
have to stand up as a people. We have to
stand up and say, hey, we're not going to tolerate
this anymore. We've got to change this. We got to
prevent innocent bunity have been executed, and we got to
(45:25):
open people's eyes to why this is such a barbaric
practice and why it should no longer take place. Go
to save Richard glossip dot com. We'll also have links
in the bio for action steps that you can take,
and you know, with that, I want to turn it
over to YouTube. Guys. Thank you for being here. With
(45:46):
us today and spreading the word about this awful injustice.
And now we turn to what we call closing arguments.
This is a section of the show where I turned
my microphone off, take back in my chair, leave my
headphones on, close my eyes, and just listen to whatever
you have to say that we may have left out,
(46:08):
or anything you want to share with our audience. So Richard,
we're going to save you for last and let don
go first. And again, Richard, I just want you to
know we're all out here thinking about you. So many
people are praying for you, and we hope to see
you free before too long. Over to you. Done well,
(46:29):
Thank you, Jason. I really appreciate you taking the time
to shine a light on this terrible case and this
terrible injustice that we are hoping to stop with with
a hearing later this year. Richard Glossop, simple guy who
was in love with a young woman. Richard loved his
job at the best budget in loved Barry van tres
(46:49):
They had a great relationship. Rich never took any money
from Barry van Tresse and very respected Rich And a
terrible murder took place that rich did not have anything
at all to do with and the wheels of justice
began to turn in Oklahoma City the way that they
did back in those days with Bob Macy, and those
(47:09):
wheels just simply ran over Richard Blossop. He was a
victim of very very poor lawyering, of over aggressive police work,
of over aggressive prosecutors who only cared about one thing,
and that was getting a conviction and getting a death sentence,
because that was the culture of Oklahoma City at the time.
(47:30):
Through a series of three letters two the current District Attorney,
David Prator, we have requested a lot of substantive information
that we believe would prove that rich Glossop had nothing
to do with this, and we have received no answers.
We continue to wait for David Prator. So at this
(47:51):
point in time, we are we're preparing for a clembency
hearing that we know we'll take place later this year,
and we are hoping that people will go to say
Richard Assip dot com. You can find a petition there
to the governor and the partner in Pearol Board letting
those people know that this is wrong, what's what's happening,
and that the only way to write it is to
grant rich clemency and to allow us to get back
(48:13):
into court again. What do you rich Um? You know,
when I walked in and took that first step on
aging it on death row, I said that I have
two choices. I can make peace with death or I
can let it destroy me. And so I made peace
with death right then and there, and I just said,
I'm not gonna let it destroy me. I'm gonna be
(48:34):
the same person I was and I am to this day.
I singing my cell out loud, I laugh, I danced around,
and guards are always freaking out because I'm the way
that I am. And I told them, I said, you know,
I was a happy guy my whole life, and I'm
not going to let this change who I am because
we only have one life to live and it's a gift.
(48:55):
And I'm going to celebrate life no matter where the
hell I'm at, even in this hole, I'm going to
celebrate life. I've heard so many stories about people who
lost it down on un and I've seen it for myself.
I've witnessed it myself. And there are a lot of
people with serious mental health issues because you're isolated for
years and years and years and and it's yeah, it's hard,
(49:17):
and thankfully I you know, I had my art. I've
written songs. I've written so many poems. I've written a
book which I can't wait to get get out there
to people because it's a book of hope. It's a
book of showing people that you you do have more
strengthen you know, and you can take your courage and
you can move forward and you can have hope at
the end. And I described the three execution attempt. I
(49:38):
describe everything because I want people to know no matter
how bad things yet there's always something good that will
come from the worst situations you face in life. You
just gotta fight for it and you've got to make
sure it happens. So it's we're in a fight. Um,
we're in a big fight with legislators and people in
(49:59):
the state of Oklahoma. We're standing up saying we need
to prevent this and and hopefully we can succeed because
I do have a lot more like the lifts, and
I do have a lot more battle to raise. Again,
the destinility look at like what's happening here in Oklahoma,
one of the biggest Republican states in the in the country.
And you have Republicans now staying and up saying we're
(50:19):
not going to tolerate this anymore. We're not gonna kill
innocent people. I'm proud of Legislator make Google and Legislator Humphrey,
and you know, even the local businessman Justin Jackson. I'm
really proud of these people because they're diehard conservative and
yet they're standing us for innocence because it's not a
left thing, and it's not a right thing. It's an
innocent thing. And we've got to stop using politics in
(50:44):
justice reform. We all want the right things. If we don't,
then then you shouldn't be an office. We all want fair,
we all want justice, and that's why I've always said
that take the blindfold off of Lady Justice, because that's
one of the things. It's always weirded me out over
the years, as you're saying, well, she's finefold folders that
she could be fair. How can you be fair if
you can't see what's going on? So take the fine
(51:07):
fold awful lettera see what's going on and she'll see
alfair of justice. Really isn't that country. Thank you for
listening to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flam. Please support your
local innocence projects and go to the link in our
bio to see how you can help. I'd like to
(51:28):
thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Clyburne and Kevin Wardens.
The music on the show, as always, is by three
time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow
us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and on Facebook at
Wrongful Conviction. Podcast. Wrangful Conviction with Jason Flam is a
production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal
(51:49):
Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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