The Case of Richard Glossip
Central Prison (where death row is for the state of NC) is right by NC State's campus. While I was there I was a heavy metal radio host for WKNC, and received a lot of letters from death row inmates.
Very few letters were of the type I was expecting at the time: "Play this Cradle of Filth song for me, or I will file down shards of my broken mirror in order to kill you". Along with very entertaining, if graphic, pieces of artwork.
Most of the letters were cordial, but gruff. Hard criticism of songs each inmate did not like, glorified praise for the songs they did like. Rarely, they would describe why a particular song was important to them and it was not anything alien to my freshman self: lost love, old buddies, family, trying times.
There was one I replied to and carried on a brief written correspondence with: Tilmon Golphin. Make no mistake, there is no excuse for his actions. But what I found fascinating was the attitude he decided to show in his letters; how true his words were I cannot accurately judge. He showed me major regret of brutally murdering officers of the law and provided no excuses, instead showing acceptance of what he had done with his brother.
I later learned that particular case of his and his brother's is one where the US Supreme Court's ruling in Roper v. Simmons divided the sentences of the brothers. Tilmon was 19, and his brother 17, so while both were sentenced to death, the SCOTUS ruling means Tilmon is still on death row while his brother is not.
I never would have thought I would learn so much from being a heavy metal radio show host.
RE: How people are and the death penalty
The other day I was driving down the road and thinking about how people are.
It was 33 years coming but here's what hit me: people do what they want, even in the face of devastating consequences.
See that long line outside any burger joint? See the stats on the amount of hard drugs guaranteed to destroy your world we consume? See that person cheating? See that DA wanting a win?
If you want a burger, a high, an orgasm or a conviction, you generally will get it at some price that's ultimately...above market.
How much more prone to excess is someone in the heat of a moment? How unlike the event does its moment by moment reconstruction during a trial appear? The mismatch has always struck me as unjust. As people judging an event whose experience they haven't had and haven't attempted to recreate. Though a jury is a good idea and the best we've got, the process they run through seems ripe for reform.
An eye for an eye has its place. If you walk into a school, start shooting and are captured alive - I think you just forfeited any claim on life or potential rehabilitation.
Any shade of grey zooming out from that seems too hard for any government system to decide well. I hear people say things in passing like "he only got 20 years". 20 years is a huge and devastating amount of time, as is one year. As we've ramped up the time on these sentences and made it an all or nothing proposition. Unfortunately, I don't think 20 years will do it if 1 year hasn't and I don't think death will do it if 20 years hasn't.
Regarding Richard Glossip. I don't know him or his case. I don't know the victim and while they won't return, there's a debt owed that I don't know how to pay. I want Richard Glossip to live. I don't think taking another life will pay the debt of the first. What I want most of all is for someone to tell me how to pay that debt.
I encourage everybody to read up on the horrors of how the death penalty functions in practice. Especially in combination with the plea-bargain system, that effectively robs > 95% of suspects from their constitutional right to a fair trial.
Finally -- and I know this is only a minor point in comparison -- it's worth noting that pg doesn't have anything to gain by writing this, and people who stick their neck out by writing about political issues inevitably get shouted at. Soon enough publishing anything stops being worth the aggravation. So credit goes to pg for standing up and speaking out, when it's all too easy to be silent.
Not the same case but Kayla Gissendaner is set to be executed tomorrow. http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/27/us/georgia-sets-execution/inde... Unless the Georgia parole board changes its mind. She is guilty of having her husband killed. Guilt is not at doubt. The justice of her punishment is.
Her children suffered from her crime but they are pleading to keep her alive. She is the only parent they have. Killing their only remaining parent is victimizing them again. Their pleas here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8pgceAhqJo
Georgia parole board contact info: http://pap.georgia.gov/contact-us
I have to wonder: before writing this essay, did pg read anything written by anyone on the opposite side of this case? For instance, this?
https://www.readfrontier.com/investigation/two-truths-and-a-...
If not, it seems like a pretty remarkable procedure to arrive at such a strong conclusion, with no other information besides a brief summary by advocates for the defense. Has pg ever served on a jury? If so, would he make his mind up this way?
It's increasingly seems that the powers of prosecutors are deployed in arbitrary and unjust ways: either overreaching (as in the case of Aaron Swartz or Xiaoxing Xi) or non-prosecution of police brutality or corporate crime (just changing now that the statute of limitations run out on those responsible for the 2008 financial crisis)
It's not clear what can be done about it, other than occasionally writing a check to the ACLU to help limit the damage. Any ideas?
So I just read whatever I could find on Richard Glossip and the case against him. On it's face it seems very likely that he is guilty.
It appears that someone had been stealing money and cooking the books at the hotels Glossip managed, and about the time his boss became aware of the theft, the boss was murdered. He admits to knowing that the boss was murdered and Glossip admits attempting to cover up the murder, his plan being to dissolve the body in acid. Glossip, as manager of the hotel the body was hidden in, reassigned cleaning staff specifically to prevent them from discovering the body. The person who is known to have performed the killing, an employee of Glossip's, says he was paid to do the killing by Glossip. Glossip also split money from the wallet carried by the man that was killed with the killer.
Glossip has had a trial and a retrial, and was convicted in both of them.
So maybe the death penalty is good, maybe it is bad. Clearly there is a serious debate there, and I am not attempting to defend the death penalty here. There is almost no chance that Glossip is innocent, and it seems clear, to me at least, that the state demonstrated he is guilty to the required standard.
I live in a country with a terrible human rights record. Yet, since 1991, it never had a death penalty applied. [1] You might get sentenced to a death penalty (on extreme cases), but it's not applied. The law still legalise it but there is some pressure to remove it currently.
I find the news that 1) a death penalty is about to take place in the U.S, 2) hastily and 3) with little evidence really shocking, disturbing and unacceptable in a country which is supposed to be at the front of defending human rights.
1: http://www.deathpenaltyworldwide.org/country-search-post.cfm...
If Richard Glossip wasn't sentenced to death, he would likely have languished in prison as long as he lived. That would also be a horrible injustice.
People see more motivated by orders of magnitude to get death penalty cases right relative to life incarceration cases.
Counterintuitively, justice may be better served by abolishing life imprisonment and mandating the death penalty for cases where periods of imprisonment would exceed 20 years or so.
If the innocence rate for executions is 4%, then surely the innocence rate for long term incarceration must be much higher.
The death penalty:
Of the 49 European countries, only 1 (Belarus) still has the death penalty and executes people.
Last time a civilian executed in Mexico: 1937, Canada: 1962, UK: 1977, Russia: 1999
In 2014, only these countries executed more people per million than the US: Equatorial Guinea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Palestine, China, Singapore, Belarus, Taiwan, Afghanistan and Egypt And North Korea N/A.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country
Internationally seen as against the universal human rights:
1948: The United Nations adopted without dissent the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The Declaration proclaims the right of every individual to protection from deprivation of life. It states that no one shall be subjected to cruel or degrading punishment. The death penalty violates both of these fundamental rights.
2005: The UNCHR approved Human Rights Resolution 2005/59 on the question of the death penalty, which called for all states that still maintain the death penalty to abolish the death penalty completely and, in the meantime, to establish a moratorium on executions.
2007: The UN General Assembly (UNGA) approved Resolution 62/149 which called for all states that still maintain the death penalty to establish a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty.
http://www.amnestyusa.org/our-work/issues/death-penalty/inte...
2015, the current year: 20 persons executed in the US
At least 278 persons executed in the US just since the last UNGA Resolution.
I highly recommend anyone interested in this to read the article Criminal Law 2.0 by Alex Kozinski (a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals). He presents twelve fundamental tenants of the criminal justice system that are flawed and suggests some ways to fix them. (E.g., "Eyewitnesses are highly reliable" and "Long sentences deter crime.") If you haven't read anything by Kozinski, you should. It's very readable. Especially the conclusion.
http://georgetownlawjournal.org/files/2015/06/Kozinski_Prefa...
In general, human testimony is one of the weakest forms of evidence we have. People, even when they don't have incentive to lie, have horrible memories! It should barely be admissible, let alone for first degree murder, especially in cases like this where the witness is being bribed for his testimony.
One thing to consider is that this case (and the 4%) figure refer to those who've been sentenced to death, where the standards for prosecution and sentencing are the absolute highest. It would only be natural to suspect that this figure is even greater the less the sentence/crime.
Until we carefully scrutinize the incentives facing the judicial system as a whole (and see how unbalanced it is), this is bound to be the norm.
"Might Sneed have lied to save his own skin? Reasonable doubt? Nothing is more likely."
And nothing more need be said. I don't understand how it seems impossible to force into people's heads the two notions that the burden of guilt lay with the prosecution and that guilt must be established beyond a reasonable doubt.
One of the most distasteful aspects of this case has been the way the Daily Oklahoman, the local newspaper, has been demanding the man's death every day, in effect reprinting the Attorney General's press releases as news and editorial columns. I point to "AG's office calls witnesses in Glossip innocence claim 'inherently suspect'" and "Glossip attorneys cross line with criticism of DA". The Daily Oklahoman is a journalistic embarrassment on every topic but in the case of Glossip it has really shone an unintentional light on bloodlust in the state.
So maybe 4% of people who get the death penalty are innocent. And some other portion probably don't deserve the death penalty according to the criteria we've established. So we get rid of it, and then what? They all get life without parole? How much better is that? And what about all the innocent people who are receiving that punishment right now? Or who are losing 5 or 10 years of their life? Getting justice right is tremendously important. The death penalty is something people can line up around without truly engaging with the justice system at all. It feels like a huge distraction to me.
We use the phrase "paying your debt to society" but no one pays any debts. They only incur debts. Debts to their family who they can't support. Debts to a society that ends up weaker than it started. The cruelty of this system isn't best exemplified in the death penalty.
The crazy thing is that although salient, of all the ways the US government kills innocent people, the death penalty probably has one of the lowest total body counts.
At least in comparison with wars of aggression, foreign coups, the war on drugs, subsidizing cars, subsidizing fossil fuels, subsidizing tobacco, weak pharma regulation, promoting antibiotics in food, cop shootings, fast food subsidies (via corn), not implementing cap & trade to combat climate change, privatized health insurance, trade embargoes, promoting harmful nutrition guidelines, lack of food safety standards/inspection, lack of any required safety testing for new chemicals, etc.
Appalled that people are killed legally based only on a criminal's word. Also appalled that we still have the death penalty in some countries, these are pretty much all backwards countries with the outliers of US and Japan; it's a litmus test for humans rights imho.
Vice released a special last night about mass incarceration related to non-violent drug crimes. It included President Obama visiting a federal prison and interviews with Former Atty. Gen. Eric Holder.
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjWSW94-P3Y
Article: https://news.vice.com/article/president-obama-heads-to-priso...
PG, thanks for writing about this and bringing both this case and the death penalty to readers' attention.
Richard Glossip's case is similar in many ways to Troy Davis[1]. You may recognize that name--in 2011, when he was executed, he was the world's most famous death row inmate. Like Glossip, Troy Davis had no physical evidence against him. His conviction (of murdering a police officer) was based primarily on 9 eyewitness testimonies. SEVEN of those eyewitnesses recanted or altered their testimonies, many citing police coercion or intimidation. Ten new witnesses came forward saying one of the two non-recanting witnesses, Sylvester Coles, confessed to the murder.
A few days before he was executed, ONE MILLION people signed a petition to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. Despite this, and the many doubts in his case, Troy Davis was executed on September 21, 2011.
I was close friends with Troy--I first visited him on death row in 2008 (when I was 15), and spent the next three years visiting him, corresponding with him, and talking to him on the phone. Troy was so well-known because his case epitomized everything that is wrong with the American justice system and the death penalty--racial bias (he was a black man accused of killing a white cop in 1980s Georgia), an overzealous DA with a history of prosecutorial misconduct, police coercion and witness tampering, the execution of innocents (over a dozen death row inmates have been exonerated since he was executed in 2011...how many innocents were executed in that time?) and a justice system so rigid and brittle that it would not even commute his sentence to life imprisonment, despite even a federal judge admitting Troy had shown at least a "minimal" level of doubt in his case.
Troy's last words, recorded minutes before he was executed, are haunting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98dlGv0k2MM
In 2012, I raised 11k on Kickstarter to write a book on my relationship with Troy Davis called Remain Free[2]. It talks about many of the ugly aspects of his life on death row and of the legal corruption in his case that he (and I) couldn't publicly talk about while he was still alive. Since the book is built on hundreds of recorded conversations, in person visits, and letters with Troy, you really get a sense of who he was as a person and the kind of toll two decades on death row takes on him and his family.
If you'd like a copy, you can order it on Amazon[3] or through http://remainfree.com. All profits go to the Innocence Project [4], a non-profit that works to free wrongfully convicted individuals through DNA testing. Alternatively, email me (gautamnarula[at]gmail.com) a screenshot of a $10 donation to the Innocence Project, and I'll send you the e-book for free. Donate $20 to the Innocence Project, and I'll send you a physical copy for just the cost of shipping ($3 in the US).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_Davis
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Remain-Free-Memoir-Gautam-Narula/dp/09...
Forget about the 4% innocent. Forget about racial bias and unreliable eyewitnesses. How about we stop executing everyone including the guilty ones.
But please, enough with the rest of the world is enlightened and America is basically gun-loving racist troglodytes. It's not true and it's not an argument which will change anyone's mind.
This is important, the "greatest country in the world" has to do better with things like this.
As pg very well says, you cannot have human lives depend on other human's lack of rigor, stupidity and incompetence
Seems like the real issue is that Oklahoma is not giving the guy a fair trial. While the finality of the death penalty makes it (or at least makes it seem) worse, it would/could be just as unfair to throw the guy in jail for life without giving him his due process.
Many people are also unaware of the high cost and inefficiency of the death penalty in the U.S. With 3002 (as of April 2015) inmates on death row, there were 35 executions in 2014. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf
Depending on the state, a trial with a death penalty could cost anywhere from half a million dollars more, to millions more than a trial without a death penalty.
Even at the absurdly high price of $35k per year per prisoner, life without parole is likely a cheaper option for tax payers than the death penalty.
I don't mean to say this is the only reason why the death penalty is wrong. We know for certain that provably innocent people have been put to death.
It's just that in addition to being morally wrong, it's also expensive and a waste of resources. The only reason I can theoretically imagine for keeping it around is that supposedly criminals might be less likely to commit a crime for fear of the death penalty. I think every serious study has shown that harsher penalties don't deter crime.
One of the best ways to actually reduce crime is to provide better early education for poor people.
The subject is different, but the point is the same:
It is hard to imagine technology restriction working, because we have to get past imagining this terribly powerful tool being wielded by our utterly incompetent and corrupt rulers. The same problem exists in contemplating effective protectionism. The most obvious outcomes of both these tools simply amount to featherbedding if not outright theft. As a result, protectionism has gained a bad name, and technology restriction is well outside the policy landscape. Yet in actual reality, the problem is not with the tool, but the wielder. Once we admit that USG isn't working and has to go, we can imagine replacing it with something that doesn't suck—and can actually wield such a tool.
—Mencius Moldbug, "Sam Altman is not a blithering idiot" (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/03/sam-alt...)
Government is too incompetent to have the power to take your life.
Very well written. I'm glad to see pg writing about things other than startups again.
If you think about it, death vs life in prison is pretty imbalanced. On one hand, you can either die immediately and escape from it all (that being the case), while on the other hand you're stuck in a cell for the rest of your life, living with your thoughts, away from the rest of society. Personally, if I had to choose, I would choose death, since it's quick and easy, and I won't have to suffer through my own thoughts on a day to day basis.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/17/us/richard-glossip-executi... gives more details about how the case has proceeded thus far. From the description of the "evidence", this seems like a clear cut failure of the justice system.
I support the death penalty, but I believe all executions should be carried out Ned Stark style. As in, if you are the Governor, and can commute the sentence, then you should be there and actually carry out the execution. If you can save a person's life, you owe it to them and society to bear the responsibility of not commuting the sentence and see what death looks like.
I'd like to examine the perverse incentives behind prosecutors going for the throat. Wouldn't this problem effectively disappear if prosecutors were ranked on "wisdom" and "mercy" instead of how badly (and cheaply) they crush someone who makes even the smallest mistake through a plea deal?
Albert Einstein:
"I have reached the conviction that the abolition of the death penalty is desirable. Reasons: 1) Irreparability in the event of an error of justice, 2) Detrimental moral influence of the execution procedure on those who, whether directly or indirectly, have to do with the procedure."
Been thinking about this subject for a long time, for very personal reasons.
Capital punishment exists so that people don't go get guns and kill lunatics that have done them harm. For some crimes, only being told "We're going to kill him" holds the social fabric together.
It's not justice, it's not fair, and it's a terrible way to run things. One could make the pragmatic argument that if you're going to have a death penalty, then hanging them outside the courthouse the day after the trial is the way to do it. Otherwise you're just making a mockery of trying to be fair -- which this was never about in the first place.
When you see somebody kill his family and then say "I deserve the death penalty", when you see families torn apart by evil who demand that the criminal must die, when you see people who are never going to be anything but killers being set free to kill again? Even though you might be against the death penalty, it's pretty obvious why it exists.
So I've given up fighting against the death penalty. These things move in cycles. Another 50 years we won't have one and people will be clamoring for one again. Instead, I'm extremely pissed about what pg mentions in closing: prosecutors playing hardball with plea bargains.
Whatever you want the laws to be, I've seen enough prosecutorial misconduct over the last decade to last several lifetimes. The vast majority of the time they're doing a great job. But 1-10% of the time the public is getting screwed. The incentives are all wrong and oversight in nonexistent. I've seen them cover for bad cop decisions, screw over aaronsw, refuse to take DNA evidence that would release innocent people from jail -- the list goes on an on. Something is really rotten and needs to be fixed.
Even if you believe in the death penalty, you have to admit that the criminal justice system is so broken that it's way beyond a reasonable doubt that we're executing people we shouldn't. The system needs fixing. Not only will this save lives, it will result in many people either not going to prison or serving much less time than they currently are.
> "Richard Glossip's only hope now is if the Supreme Court intervenes."
Couldn't the President of the United States, Governor of Oklahoma, or other federal judges below the level of the Supreme Court intervene, at least temporarily?
More generally it seems his argument is: Lessen the punishment because the judicial system isn't reliable. That doesn't seem right. Maybe it should be fixed, rather than introducing hacks like this.
You can argue against the death penalty a thousands ways. It is statistically racist, it is against the Christian way which is supposedly important in America, there is little reason to kill someone when you can securely lock them away indefinitely.
I don't see how you can argue for the death penalty. Killing people doesn't help anyone. Who has lived a happy and healthy life as a result of a death row execution of someone with a life sentence?
An excellent book about another death row inmate (who was eventually exonerated): http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Time-18-Year-Odyssey-Freedom/d...
The level of corruption/manipulation/etc. in some of these death row cases is very frightening.
> at least 4% of people sentenced to death are innocent
It should be made clear that this statistic was not derived from counting up actual innocent people who were sentenced. It was a statistical estimate with a number of assumptions built in to it. Not defending the death penalty, just pointing out something that was not stated precisely in my opinion.
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"There" is reasonable doubt doesn't mean much.
Reasonable doubt is not an observable quantity, like water on Mars; the question is whether jurors in the case doubted of the culpability of the accused. Obviously they didn't.
If they did, that may save this man's life, but do nothing against death penalty. Death penalty is barbaric; if you can make the case that guilty people should not be executed, I think it's much stronger than if you just argue in favor of the innocent.
... notwithstanding the fact that Scalia argued in 2009 that executing innocent people was perfectly fine: "This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent". (You have to love the quotes around the word 'actually').
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Completely OT: inconsistent number of spaces after periods is very annoying (the second paragraph has one, the third or 7th have two for example; the 6th paragraph has both). The correct number of spaces after a period is ONE, but if you disagree, the least you can do is be consistent.
If we can't entrust the justice system with the death penalty, how can we entrust it with a lifetime imprisonment? If we eliminate lifetime imprisonment, can we really trust them with 35 year sentences? Twenty years?
There is no punishment that fits both the guilty and the innocent. There is no compromise.
I recently read a book that makes this same case very strongly:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JYWVYLY
I was incredibly eye-opening how common this kind of thing is. It makes me sick.
Even if everybody on death row were guilty beyond all doubt, I don't think it is right to sentence an innocent person to kill another human for any reason.
I wouldn't want it on my conscience, so how can I demand if of someone else? No innocent person deserves that responsibility.
I agree, you should not have death penalty in US, specially without any physical evidence. This is a broken system and it should be fixed!
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I upvoted this mainly because I think it's healthy that people consider the ethics by which they and their fellow citizens live. But generally speaking, this is a stupid reason not to kill someone.
The DA basically told this guy point-blank that if you don't want to die, take this deal. If you do want to die, don't take the deal.
He chose not to take the deal.
Is there a chance that "good sense" could have prevailed, and that by some fluke, some part of the system wouldn't work, and so he would be saved from the death penalty? Maybe. But if he had taken the deal, he would definitely not have died.
This guy chose to play russian roulette with a six-shooter with five bullets in it and lost. And this is the reason we shouldn't kill people? Because a guy who can't do the basic math of "which choice is more likely to end in my death" chose poorly?
No. The guy should have taken the deal. Much like the rest of the people on the planet who choose to take huge risks with their life, he's going to lose out on this bet. And that has nothing to do with why we should stop the state from killing people.
Our system of justice is based on laws and rules. They can't be broken arbitrarily, which is why innocent people are put to death. Not because we're mean. Not because we're stupid. We make the rules, and we have to enforce them. In this case, one of our rules is, if you do X, you die.
So, if you don't believe in killing innocent people, by all means, get rid of that rule. But don't tell me we should get rid of the rule because the rules weren't perfect.
A solution is to build a platform that crowdsources such cases to raise awareness AND a call for action. The community would need to be unbelievable but it's not at all impossible. Once there are 100,000 signatures on any petition under 30 days, the White House guarantees a response. There are many great communities with more than 100,000 active users. Why not?
> That's why we can't have the death penalty in the US. I don't know exactly when it's permissible to kill someone. But I know for sure the Oklahoma judicial system should not be allowed to. If they have that power, all it takes is a half-assed police investigation plus a prosecutor playing hardball with plea bargains, and innocent people die.
Mmm? So, because the system is not perfect, we should remove death penalty altogether? Is that seriously the point PG is making here?
IRL there is no perfect system whatsoever. Yet we learn how to live with risk and deficiencies and hopefully improve things as we move forward to make less mistakes. Whether that applies to the US Judicial system, I don't know, but that's not a good reason to remove the death row altogether. There are a number of criminals who are well known to have no empathy and can kill without remorse or emotion, and I don't see how this kind of individuals can be rehabilitated in any way within society. On top of that, every individual who is conscious about their actions should also face responsibility - that's part of the "social contract" on which we base our actions every single day. There should be strong consequences for murder and certainly Death Row has its place as well.
But yeah, there is no discussion that we should have due process to make sure ONLY convicted criminals (with proper evidence) go to Death Row.