A man due to be executed on Wednesday in Oklahoma was granted a two-week stay of execution just hours before he was to be put to death.
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals granted the stay of execution to Richard Glossip, who was set to be executed at the state’s death chamber in McAlester on Wednesday at 3pm local time for the 1997 murder of hotel owner Barry Van Treese.
Concerns had been expressed that the state was about to put to death an innocent man.
After the decision on the stay, Oklahoma governor Mary Fallin said her office “will respect whatever decision the court makes, as we have throughout this process”.
“My thoughts and prayers go out to the Van Treese family who has suffered greatly during this long ordeal.”
Earlier she had denied the possibility of a stay of execution for the convicted murderer.
Mr Van Treese, owner of the Best Budget Inn, was bludgeoned to death by Justin Sneed, a 19-year-old drifter with an eighth-grade education whom Glossip allowed to stay at the motel in return for maintenance work.
Glossip was convicted in 1998 and sentenced to death that year, with the decision upheld on appeal.
However, Glossip’s supporters and legal team say new evidence has emerged that points to his innocence.
They filed a last-minute petition with the court to halt the execution.
No physical evidence links Glossip to the crime, his lawyers said, adding he was convicted largely on the testimony of Justin Sneed.
Glossip’s lawyers noted that Sneed changed his story several times before he admitted to the murder, then made a deal for life in prison in return for implicating Glossip.
In a new report commissioned by the defence team and released on Friday, Richard A Leo, an expert on police interrogations, said that based on transcripts of Sneed’s questioning and testimony, officers had used techniques that were known to cause false confessions - like telling him he would be the scapegoat for the murder, planting the idea that Glossip was the mastermind and pressuring Sneed to say so.
The defence also released on Friday an affidavit from a former drug dealer who said he repeatedly sold methamphetamine to Sneed at the Best Budget Inn, that Sneed appeared to be addicted and that he paid for drugs with items he stole from cars and rooms in the motel.
Glossip’s execution would be the first in Oklahoma since the US Supreme Court in June ruled that the use of midazolam, a sedative used in the lethal injection procedure, did not violate the US constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Lawyers for Glossip and two other Oklahoma death row inmates had challenged the use of midazolam, saying it could not achieve the level of unconsciousness required for surgery, making it unsuitable for executions.
A stay for Glossip had won the backing of an unusual group including former US senator Tom Coburn, a conservative Republican; former Dallas Cowboys and University of Oklahoma football coach Barry Switzer; and the Innocence Project, a group that seeks to exonerate wrongly convicted prisoners.
“We are seriously racing against time, as you can imagine,” said one of Glossip’s lawyers, Donald R Knight.
“We’re trying to do work that should have been done by trial lawyers a long time ago.”
Ms Fallin, a Republican, earlier said her legal team examined what lawyers for Glossip called “new evidence” and determined it was neither new nor substantial enough to warrant a stay of execution.
“After carefully reviewing the facts of this case multiple times, I see no reason to cast doubt on the guilty verdict reached by the jury or to delay Glossip’s sentence of death. For that reason I am rejecting his request for a stay of execution,” she had said in a statement.
“The state of Oklahoma is prepared to hold him accountable for his crimes and move forward with his scheduled execution.”
Barry C Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project in New York, said there were serious “residual doubts” about Glossip’s guilt.
A number of cases in which those sentenced to death were later exonerated, he said, had similarly relied on witnesses who benefited from testimony.
Glossip was first found guilty and sentenced to death in 1998, but a state appeals court ordered a retrial because his defence lawyers had failed to cross-examine or investigate witnesses effectively.
He was again convicted and condemned in 2004, and the courts did not find evidence of deficiencies that would require a new appeal.
But Mr Knight said the new team had identified weaknesses with that second defence as well. By all accounts, Glossip’s behavior on the day after the murder hurt his case.
He later admitted that Sneed knocked on his door late that night and told him he had just killed Van Treese. He said he did not believe him at first and went back to sleep.
But he did not mention Sneed’s statement to the police when they initially questioned him the next day, after Van Treese’s wife reported him missing and his unlocked car was found across the street from the motel.
Sneed testified that he had taken about $4,000 from Van Treese’s car and divided it with Glossip the next morning, and that Glossip had sent him to buy a hacksaw, trash bags and muriatic acid to help dispose of the body.
Glossip denied those accusations. In any event, Sneed fled on his skateboard, and Glossip was taken into custody after the body was discovered in the motel room the night after the murder. At that point, he did reveal what Sneed had told him.
Last year, in a mysterious twist, the pardon and parole board received an email that was purportedly written by Sneed’s daughter, O’Ryan Justine Sneed.
Pleading for clemency for what she called “an innocent man”, she wrote that her father had told her that Glossip had not asked him to commit the murder. She said her father had considered recanting, but was afraid his plea deal would unravel and he would be sentenced to death himself.
But the daughter left no contact information, and so far no one has been able to find her or authenticate the email.
Sneed has made no such statement himself.
The Glossip case reflects a common problem in capital punishment, Scheck said: a poor defence in the initial trial, which then limits the legal options in later appeals. “What frequently happens in these capital cases is that the really good lawyers only get involved at the end, when it’s too late,” Scheck said.
Van Treese’s family is convinced of Glossip’s guilt and had thanked the governor for standing firm.
“Execution of Richard Glossip will not bring Barry back or lessen the empty hole left in the lives of those who loved Barry,” family members said in a statement this week to The Tulsa World.
Additional reporting: Reuters, NYT