Waiting to watch a man die

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Yesterday (Wednesday, Sept. 30) I got up, packed my kids off to school and prepared to drive two hours to see a man die.

But for the second time in two weeks he didn’t die, and I’m exhausted.

I was covering the third attempt by the state of Oklahoma to execute Richard Glossip for the murder of his employer Barry Van Treese in 1997, for the online magazine Red Dirt Report.

Glossip was convicted in two trials for hiring Justin Sneed to murder Van Treese. Murder for hire is considered heinous enough to merit the death penalty, even though the actual killer got only life in a medium-security prison.

I will state up-front that I’ve mostly heard from the people who think Glossip is innocent. I have tried to look for the case for the prosecution to be fair, but I must say the level of uncertainty here is enough to make me very nervous about killing a man.

The case for the prosecution appears to consist of the testimony of a meth head petty thief, plus Glossip’s highly suspicious actions following the murder. Glossip did not report the murder immediately and locked the motel room where the body was.

However, there are other explanations for this behavior – the obvious one being panic.

The prosecution’s theory of motive seems very far-fetched to me. That Glossip hoped after the murder of his employer that his widow would just give him both of Van Treese’s motels (in Oklahoma City and Tulsa) to manage.

Come on! How likely is that?

Neither jury saw a video of Sneed’s interrogation where he changed his story multiple times, and only implicated Glossip when the detectives suggested Glossip put him up to the murder.

The defense team is not stressing this, but Glossip is certainly guilty of being an accessory AFTER the fact. For which he would have quite deservedly gotten some time, but likely been out by now.

I got into this riding on the coat tails of Tim Farley, who has followed this story from the beginning. He’s done all the work and I stepped into it just because I’m doing some casual free lancing for The Red Dirt Report and have the time to travel.

So there I was, preparing to go to join the press pool at the media center of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, popularly known to us Okies as “Big Mac.”

I told my son, 14, and my daughter, nine, where I was going and what I was going to do. I told them there were corn dogs in the freezer and that I’d likely be home late if the execution went through.

“Then I hope you come home early Daddy,” my daughter said.

I told her they had cookies at the media center.

“Ohhh, can you bring me some?” she pleaded.

“No!” surprising myself a little with how vehemently I said it.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because Daddy is a superstitious Celt at heart and I’m not going to bring my baby girl cookies from an execution party,” I explained.

“You’re mean,” she said.

You can follow the link to the story I wrote for the Red Dirt Report. I’m rather proud of it, considering I wrote it late at night, dead tired, after I’d driven home, fed my kids, did the eye exercises for my girl’s ambliopia, and put them to bed.

I’m still processing this experience, and it’s not over yet. I want it to mean something because a man I think is probably innocent, and certainly hasn’t been convicted with enough certainty to warrant death, may yet die in another 37 days.

Like a lot of people I’m conflicted about the death penalty. I’m terrified of mistakes, and since the death penalty was reinstated more than a hundred people have been released from death row in America, 10 of them in Oklahoma alone.

Worse, the guilt of some who have been executed has been called into question.

But, I’m glad Roger Dale Stafford and Sean Sellars were executed. I’m glad because they scared me. Like a lot of people, I want to have my cake and eat it too.

And I want this to mean something to my children, because the world is a dangerous place, especially for those who don’t know how dangerous it can be.

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