There is no dispute about this basic fact in the death penalty case the Supreme Court will hear on Wednesday: On a chilly morning in January 1997, in Room 102 of the Best Budget Motel in Oklahoma City, a handyman named Justin Sneed beat the motel’s owner to death with a baseball bat.
The rest of what happened is murkier. In exchange for a life sentence, Mr. Sneed testified that the motel’s manager, Richard Glossip, had commissioned the murder of its owner, Barry Van Treese. Based on that testimony, the only direct evidence linking Mr. Glossip to the crime, he was sentenced to death.
Last year, prosecutors disclosed long-suppressed notes that undermined Mr. Sneed’s testimony. They helped cause Oklahoma’s attorney general, Gentner Drummond, a Republican, to ask the state’s highest court for criminal matters to throw out Mr. Glossip’s conviction and order a retrial.
Lawyers call such requests “confessions of error,” and courts ordinarily give them great weight. But the state court refused.
In an unusual alliance, Mr. Drummond then joined lawyers for the inmate to ask the Supreme Court to step in to prevent what they said would be a grave miscarriage of justice produced by flagrant prosecutorial misconduct.
Mr. Drummond said his stance had come with a political cost.
“I’ve been criticized by prosecutors, attorneys general and politicians,” he said in an interview, “and that really has absolutely no bearing on my commitment to the rule of law. And if at the end of my term the citizens of Oklahoma would prefer to have a politician, as opposed to one who’s going to follow the law, then they have every right to elect that person and remove me from office.”
The Supreme Court, which has in recent years had little patience with death penalty appeals, agreed to hear the case.
Because both sides agreed that Mr. Glossip’s conviction should be overturned, the court appointed Christopher Michel, who once served as a law clerk to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., to argue in favor of allowing the execution to proceed. He said Mr. Drummond’s confession of error was not the end of the matter.
“In Oklahoma, as elsewhere, the decision whether to vacate a final criminal conviction rests with the judiciary, not officials in the executive branch,” Mr. Michel said in an email. “That is because vacating a final criminal conviction implicates interests beyond those of the prosecutor or the defendant, including public safety, the rights of crime victims and their families, and the rule of law.”
The Supreme Court is familiar with Mr. Glossip, who was the subject of a landmark 2015 decision in which the court, by a 5-to-4 vote, endorsed executing condemned inmates with a combination of chemicals that the dissenters said would leave them “exposed to what may well be the chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake.”
The new case revolves around testimony offered by Mr. Sneed at Mr. Glossip’s second trial, in 2004. (A state court overturned his first conviction, ruling that his lawyer had been ineffective.)
“When I was arrested,” Mr. Sneed said under oath, “I asked for some Sudafed because I had a cold, but then shortly after that somehow they ended up giving me lithium for some reason. I don’t know why. I never seen no psychiatrist or anything.”
The prosecutor, Connie Smothermon, followed up, underscoring the testimony. “So you don’t know why they gave you that?” she asked of the drug. Mr. Sneed said no.
The recently disclosed notes, the parties say, contradict Mr. Sneed’s statements and indicate that Ms. Smothermon knowingly allowed the witness to present false testimony.
“Sneed had been treated by a psychiatrist in 1997,” Mr. Drummond told the justices. “Further, he was not prescribed lithium for a cold. Instead, he was prescribed it to treat his serious psychiatric condition that, combined with his known methamphetamine use, would have had an impact on his credibility and memory recall.”
Lawyers for both sides said prosecutors had violated fundamental requirements established in two Supreme Court precedents: Brady v. Maryland, which requires them to turn over potentially exculpatory evidence, and Napue v. Illinois, which forbids them to knowingly present false testimony.
Those are bedrock principles, Don Knight, a lawyer for Mr. Glossip, said in an interview.
Mr. Drummond, the attorney general, said he had tried hundreds of cases. “I’m not a bad attorney in the courtroom,” he said. Had he been a defense lawyer supplied with the withheld notes, he said, “I believe that I could have created reasonable doubt, sufficient, potentially sufficient, to not have Mr. Glossip convicted of murder.”
Mr. Michel, the lawyer appointed by the court to defend the conviction, told the justices that the parties’ arguments were based on four cryptic words included in notes prepared by Ms. Smothermon when she interviewed Mr. Sneed in 2003 in preparation for the retrial.
“On Lithium?” one notation said. “Dr Trumpet?” said another.
That second question was an apparent reference to Dr. Lawrence Trombka, who was the sole psychiatrist at the jail where Mr. Sneed was held after the murder.
In a sworn statement last year, Dr. Trombka stopped short of saying he had prescribed lithium to Mr. Sneed, though he said that it was “ a first-line drug used to treat patients diagnosed with bipolar disorder” and that it would “not be prescribed for a cold or confused by medical health professionals with Sudafed.” He added that methamphetamines taken during manic episodes “may cause an individual to be more paranoid or potentially violent.”
Mr. Michel, the lawyer appointed to defend the conviction, said Mr. Glossip and the state were relying on a strained interpretation of the two notations.
For one thing, Mr. Michel wrote, Mr. Glossip’s lawyers have “known since 1997 that Sneed had been prescribed lithium and that he testified accurately to that fact.”
“Their case,” Mr. Michel added, “thus comes down to the following series of inferences: ‘Dr. Trumpet?’ refers to former Oklahoma County jail psychiatrist Lawrence Trombka; Trombka treated Sneed, even though he has produced no record of doing so; and the jury, which knew that Sneed had been prescribed lithium, may not have found petitioner guilty of Van Treese’s murder if it had known that Sneed purportedly received the lithium from a psychiatrist — as opposed to another medical provider.”
Ms. Smothermon, who wrote the contested notes, told an independent counsel appointed by Mr. Drummond that she was not convinced that “Dr. Trumpet” and Dr. Trombka were the same person.
In a letter to a lawyer for the Van Treese family, Ms. Smothermon said the two queries in her notes recounted questions members of the defense team had posed to Mr. Sneed rather than facts he volunteered or conclusions the prosecutors had reached. And in an email appended to a Supreme Court brief filed by the family lawyer, Paul Cassell, she wrote that she might have made “a personal note” about “Dr Trumpet the jazz musician.”
Ms. Smothermon declined a request for an interview. “Out of respect for the family,” she wrote in an email, “I don’t speak with members of the media. The victim and his family should be the focus of your article.”
Mr. Cassell, a former federal judge, said the attorney general’s office had turned down opportunities to learn more about Ms. Smothermon’s interpretation of her notes.
“There’s no indication that the A.G.’s office really wants to figure out what happened in the case and really wants to determine what those notes say,” Mr. Cassell said in an interview. “Instead, it looks like the A.G.’s office wants to hop on a white horse and ride to the rescue of a, quote, innocent, close quote, death row inmate and can’t let the truth and the facts get in the way of that crusade.”
In a report issued last year, the independent counsel, Rex Duncan, concluded that “the state must vacate Glossip’s conviction. But he added that there was other evidence, including false statements to the police and an inability to explain his possession of a large sum of money, that indicate that Mr. Glossip “is not actually innocent of criminal culpability.”
A few weeks after that report, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board deadlocked by a 2-to-2 vote on Mr. Glossip’s request for a recommendation of clemency. The fifth member, Richard Smothermon, recused himself because of a conflict of interest: He is the husband of Connie Smothermon, the prosecutor who had prepared the contested notes.
Mr. Glossip’s case has been convoluted even by the standards of capital litigation. The Supreme Court has considered six of his petitions seeking review, granting two. Nine execution dates have come and gone. He has been served three last meals.
Derek Van Treese, a son of the motel’s owner, said the legal battle had been painful. “As a family, we have endured years of heartache and frustration,” he said in an email. “But we continue to trust the judicial system to perform its duties in the pursuit of justice.”
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