Politics

Thomas and Alito sound eager to push for execution despite prosecutor’s objection

Published

2 years ago

November 11, 2024

Thomas and Alito sound eager to push for execution despite prosecutor’s objection

Even Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general thinks death row prisoner Richard Glossip should get a new trial. You might think that automatically means he wouldn’t be executed, but it’s not that simple with this Supreme Court.

Indeed, the court appointed a third party to defend the state court ruling that, if upheld by the justices, would send Glossip to the execution chamber. That’s despite the state’s admission that prosecutorial misconduct tainted his trial.

All this led to a strange high court hearing in Washington on Wednesday, where three lawyers presented arguments to the justices. One represented Glossip, another represented Oklahoma, and the third defended the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals’ ruling against Glossip.

It’s not unheard of for the justices to appoint third parties to defend abandoned positions, but the practice made for an unusual outing in this capital case. Former U.S. solicitors general represented Glossip (Seth Waxman) and Oklahoma (top conservative lawyer Paul Clement). The appointed lawyer, Christopher Michel, also previously worked in the solicitor general’s office, and he clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts as well as Justice Brett Kavanaugh when the latter was a federal appeals court judge.

But despite the state’s confession of error, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in particular quizzed the lawyers in ways that suggested those justices want Glossip’s execution to go forward. That’s not surprising, given that they and Justice Neil Gorsuch have split from even their Republican-appointed colleagues to vote against death row prisoners.

So what about Gorsuch, then? In another twist, he’s recused. He didn’t explain why, but it’s probably because he sat on prior Glossip-related litigation when he was a federal appellate judge on the court that covers Oklahoma.

But even in Gorsuch’s absence, it’s not guaranteed that Glossip and Oklahoma will succeed in getting a new trial. Because a 4-4 tie would uphold the state court ruling, they need to convince a majority of this eight-justice court. Wednesday’s hearing reflected that the court’s three Democratic appointees are (as expected) prepared to side with Glossip, who maintains his innocence. That leaves the open question of Roberts and Justices Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, whose votes can be decisive at the court these days. This life-or-death appeal is no different.

How the court will ultimately rule, in a decision expected by late June, is further complicated by the fact that there are multiple legal issues in play. There’s a threshold issue (added by the court when it took up the case) about whether the justices even have jurisdiction to review the Oklahoma state court ruling. It’s the sort of procedural hurdle that the high court likes to employto avoid having to deal with potential injustices lurking in the actual merits of cases.

The merits of Glossip’s appeal deal with due process, including whether that constitutional mandate was violated when prosecutors suppressed their key witness’s admission that he was under the care of a psychiatrist and failed to correct the witness’s false testimony about that care and related diagnosis.

With the caveat that questions at oral argument don’t necessarily signal how a justice will vote, Kavanaugh at one point asked the appointed lawyer, Michel, a question that could be seen as hopeful for Glossip:

I think you had said earlier …, if you get past all the procedural bars and you get to the point where the prosecutors didn’t comply with their obligations, that it still wouldn’t have made a difference to the jury had they known that Sneed [the key state witness] was bipolar and that he had lied on the stand. And I’m having some trouble on that last piece of the argument, if we get there, … when the whole case depended on his credibility.

Thomas, meanwhile, seemed to take offense at the notion that there was prosecutorial misconduct in this case. At least he thought the prosecutors didn’t get to fully explain themselves. “[I]t would seem that because not only, you know, their reputations are being impugned, but they are central to this case, it would seem that … an interview of these two prosecutors would be central,” Thomas said, in a theme that he pressed throughout the hearing.

Lawyers for Glossip and Oklahoma contested that the prosecutors were given short shrift. But on the subject of factual discrepancies in the case, some justices’ questions raised the prospect of the court sending the case back for a hearing to get more information. While that could obviously be better for Glossip (and Oklahoma) than the justices upholding the state court ruling against him right now, his lawyer said on Wednesday that “[n]o evidentiary hearing could alter the conclusion that Mr. Glossip was denied due process.”

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Jordan Rubin

Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined BLN, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.

Politics

World Cup fuels ticketing reform demands

Published

10 hours ago

June 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Demands are growing for a political reckoning over ticket scams at the World Cup — and beyond.

The National Independent Venue Association and Fan Alliance, organizations representing and advocating for entertainment venues and artists respectively, sent a joint letter to Congress on Thursday, calling on lawmakers to ban speculative and ghost tickets, cases where resellers flog tickets they don’t actually have.

The letter — addressed to Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer — includes nearly two dozen accounts of fans who say they were scammed out of thousands of dollars trying to get tickets to the World Cup, which began last week. The groups are also asking fans to share their own stories with elected officials via the Fix the Tix Fan Action Center that launched last week.

“Every one of these stories erodes the public’s faith that consumers should and will be protected from fraud,” NIVA Executive Director Stephen Parker and Fan Alliance founder Donald Cohen wrote. “We urge Congress to work with us to prevent fraud like this in the future and finally enact ticket resale consumer protections that will protect Americans and ensure affordability.”

The letter flagged fans like Dacy Gillespie, who bought World Cup tickets for her sons on Christmas, only to learn on match day — months later — that the seller couldn’t deliver them. And Skylie Shore, who Parker and Cohen said spent well over $6,000 on tickets to the Scotland-Haiti match on June 13, but was forced to wait outside the stadium because she couldn’t access them as fans marched in on gameday.

“These examples reveal a consistent pattern: consumer deception, speculative ticket sales, and broken-hearted American families at the hands of resale ticketing companies like StubHub,” Parker and Cohen wrote.

In a statement, StubHub spokesperson Jack Sterne said that the platform does not allow speculative ticket sales, and blamed FIFA for users’ difficulty in accessing their tickets.

“We understand that attending the World Cup represents a significant investment in time and money, and we take our responsibility to every fan who books through our platform seriously,” Sterne said in a statement. “Many of the issues fans are facing trace back to the event organizer’s technology infrastructure, newly announced transfer restrictions, and a new app that was launched just a month ago.”

In response, FIFA said in a statement that the organization “can guarantee the validity and delivery of tickets purchased through its official platforms” and that FIFA.com/tickets “is the official ticket sales channel” for the tournament.

NIVA and Fan Alliance are urging congressional leadership to place universal price-gouging limits on ticket resale, enact stringent fines on perpetrators and a violation-reporting mechanism for ticket scams, and require secondary ticketing platforms to produce data on ticket fulfillment and consumer complaints.

The groups are not the only ones monitoring for evidence of shady ticket practices. Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway issued a consumer guidance in advance of the tournament, urging match-goers to beware of fraud and promising to hold offenders accountable. And the FBI in May put out a public service announcement, warning fans against purchasing tickets on copycat websites modeled on FIFA’s.

“With the World Cup coming to Kansas City, excitement is high and, unfortunately, so is the potential for fraud,” Hanaway said in her statement. “Missourians should be able to enjoy this once-in-a-generation event without fear of being deceived. My office will hold accountable anyone who seeks to exploit our families, and we stand ready to assist anyone who encounters suspicious activity.”