(decided February 25, 2025)
In this case, the Court vacated the twenty -year-old state court murder conviction of Mr. Glossip, and ordered the state court that convicted him to retry his case. In doing so, the Court relied on one of its caselaw precedents that construed the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment as requiring a retrial in a criminal case, whenever it is determined that the original prosecutor knowingly relied on perjured and uncorrected testimony to obtain a conviction. The Court found that those facts actually occurred during Mr. Glossip’s original murder trial some twenty years earlier. The vote on the Court was 5-3, with Justices Thomas and Alito fully dissenting, and Justice Barrett partially dissenting. (Justice Gorsuch did not participate in the case.)
COMMENT: The sight of the United States Supreme Court making original findings of fact (i.e., that the original prosecutor knowingly used perjured and uncorrected testimony to obtain a conviction) that no lower court had ever made in Mr. Glossip’s case, is extremely troubling. The Supreme Court’s usual duty under the Constitution is to hear appeals of legal questions from lower courts. Indeed, the federal Constitution literally prohibits, with some exceptions not relevant here, the Supreme Court from re-trying a case on the facts. See U.S. Const., Article III, Section 2.
I agree with Justice Barrett’s dissenting Opinion here. She frankly accused the Justices who approved the majority Opinion of exceeding their Constitutional power, by inappropriately finding facts. Those Justices should have simply cited their caselaw precedent as authority to be considered further by the lower state courts from which Mr. Glossip’s case came, and then remanded the case back to those courts for further consideration. That kind of remand here might have eventually produced a new trial for Mr. Glossip, but it might also have produced a finding that the lead prosecutor in the first trial did not commit the violation of law that the Supreme Court accused her of, twenty years after it allegedly occurred.
RECENT RULINGS 