Florida jurors and Oregon’s governor were unlikely heroes in the fight against executions last year. But elsewhere the death mill continues to grind.
Glossip is set to die for the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese, owner of the Best Budget Inn in Oklahoma City. Yet it’s universally acknowledged that Glossip, the motel manager, didn’t do it. No one argues that Glossip was even in the room when Van Treese was bludgeoned to death by maintenance worker Justin Sneed. No one questions Sneed’s confession. No one doubts that Sneed was rewarded with life in prison, instead of the death penalty, in exchange for blaming Glossip as the supposed mastermind. No one claims that Sneed is an honest man.
But the bureaucracy of death has a schedule to keep, and there are few places in the nation where that terrifyingly normal machinery moves