Richard Glossip parents: Meet Sally Glossip and Heron Glossip
This article will inform readers about the parent of Richard Glossip, Sally Glossip, and Heron Glossip.
Richard Eugene Glossip is an American prisoner currently on death row at Oklahoma State Penitentiary after being convicted of commissioning the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese. The man who murdered Van Treese, Justin Sneed, had a “meth habit” and agreed to plead guilty in exchange for testifying against Glossip.
Sneed received a life sentence without parole. Glossip’s case has attracted international attention due to the unusual nature of his conviction, namely that there was little or no corroborating evidence, with the first case against him described as “extremely weak” by the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals.
Glossip is notable for his role as named plaintiff in the 2015 Supreme Court case Glossip v. Gross, which ruled that executions carried out by a three-drug protocol of midazolam, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In September and October 2015, Glossip was granted three successive stays of execution due to questions about Oklahoma’s lethal injection drugs after Oklahoma Department of Corrections officials used potassium acetate instead of potassium chloride to execute Charles Frederick Warner on January 15, 2015, contrary to protocol. Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt ordered a multicounty grand jury investigation of the execution drug mix-up.
On January 7, 1997, Justin Sneed beat Barry Van Treese to death with a baseball bat. The killing occurred at the Best Budget Inn in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where Van Treese was the owner, Sneed was the maintenance man, and Glossip was the manager. In exchange for avoiding the death penalty, Sneed confessed and told police that Glossip had instructed him to commit the murder.
Glossip insisted on his actual innocence and refused to accept a plea bargain. In July 1998, an Oklahoma jury convicted Glossip of the murder and sentenced him to death. In 2001, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals unanimously threw out that conviction, calling the case “extremely weak” and finding Glossip had received unconstitutionally ineffective assistance of counsel.
In August 2004, a second Oklahoma jury convicted Glossip of the murder and sentenced him to death. Glossip complained that prosecutors had intimidated his defense attorney into resigning. However, in April 2007, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the death sentence, with two judges in the majority, one judge specially concurring, and two judges dissenting.
Glossip’s legal team asserts that Justin Sneed was addicted to methamphetamine at the time that he murdered Van Treese and that he habitually broke into vehicles in the parking lot of the Best Budget Inn while he was employed as a maintenance man. Glossip’s execution is controversial because he was convicted almost entirely on the testimony of Sneed, who confessed to bludgeoning Van Treese to death with an aluminum baseball bat by himself and who was spared a death sentence himself by implicating Glossip.
While on death row, Richard Glossip married Leigha Joy Jurasik of New Jersey at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary on 27 September 2018. The couple divorced in February 2021. Glossip had a “relationship” with Melissa Ratliff, who first contacted him in 2015. Their contract ended in January 2021. Both Jurasik and Ratliff accused Glossip of threatening them. In March 2022, he married Lea Rodger of Florida, an anti-death penalty advocate. He has eaten his last meal three times.
Richard Glossip is in the news after he was denied another appeal to vacate his murder conviction in the death of his boss in 1997 and still faces execution in May.
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals decision comes two weeks after a special counsel report recommended Glossip’s capital murder conviction be vacated and that he be granted a new trial, citing newly uncovered evidence in his case.
The former motel manager, who has been behind bars for 26 years, was convicted in 1998 of capital murder for ordering the killing of his boss, Barry Van Treese.
Richard Glossip parents
Heron and Sally Glossip welcomed Richard Eugene Glossip into the world on February 9, 1963, in Galesburg, Illinois. Sally Fields, his mother’s maiden name, was Fields. Glossip was one of Heron and Sally’s 16 children—eight boys and eight girls.
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