Boundless Hope

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Susan Sarandon is one of the five or six women in the world who might persuade me to relocate my family to Utah.

So when she sent me a letter this morning, I paid attention. It wasn’t what I expected.

She’s trying to save someone’s life — not make mine more interesting.

With Sister Helen Prejean, whom Sarandon portrayed in the movie “Dead Man Walking,” she’s hoping to convince the governor of Oklahoma that sixty days is a fair price to pay to make sure a convicted killer truly warrants the death penalty state law handed him.

Sarandon thinks it a downright bargain and, as it turns out, so does the daughter of the man whose testimony put Richard Glossip on death row. She says her father, who made his own bargain to avoid the needle by claiming Glossip hired him to kill a man, has talked to her about admitting it isn’t true. Her father, she believes, said it to save his own life.

Right now, they’re not even asking to halt the execution, scheduled for 16 September. They just want to delay it by sixty days so Glossip’s pro bono lawyers can present the new evidence. They hope a petition to the governor can buy that time.

It isn’t about the death penalty. It’s about whether the state of Oklahoma can afford the time to see if the four men on its death row over the past thirty-five years, convicted based on false testimony of men who traded reduced sentences for lies later exposed, should be joined by a fifth, or instead be subjected to this.

The petition is here.