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Comment by GavinMcG | Hacker News Reader

This is just the court following the law Oklahoma has enacted, which does not give it the power to act here. It's not forcing anything—it's doing the nothing it's empowered to do. If Oklahoma wants its court to have the power to grant relief, it can change its law. (Or better, just get rid of the death penalty entirely.)

The statute in question ([0] – see (D)(8)) says the court may not consider the merits or grant relief unless there are facts or legal rationales that could not have been raised earlier. The court isn't empowered to do something just because two parties agree.

Also, the governor can commute the sentence, as he did for Julius Jones.

[0] https://casetext.com/statute/oklahoma-statutes/title-22-crim...

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> The court isn't empowered to do something just because two parties agree.

It can find executing an innocent person to be unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment, and that the statute preventing review of the case on its merits is similarly unconstitutional as a result.

Do you want courts ignoring other precedents from the Supreme Court whenever they feel like it? Or considering arguments that the parties don’t make, just so that they can reach the outcome they desire and view as a moral issue?

As bad as things can be in a system that doesn’t always reach a just result, I think it’s almost certainly worse to have courts that feel empowered to do whatever they want.

Yes, I absolutely want the courts to periodically revisit things that are clear miscarriages of justice.

How do you define a miscarriage of justice?

What definition wouldn’t include “you’re innocent, everyone involved now agrees on that, but you proved it too late, so die”?

That doesn't generalize and two people is not "everyone".

If everything could be reliably generalized we wouldn’t need appeals/Supreme courts in the first place.

There seems to be little dissent on the “this conviction was unfair” front in this case.

There’s no dissent on the unfair conviction. The dissent is on the remedy. Courts don’t make law. That’s a good thing. The legislature can fix the law to allow revisiting cases or abolish the death penalty, or both. The governor can pardon this man. The courts already mishandled the case, why do we expect them to fix it? This is why we have separate but equal branches of government.

> Courts don’t make law. That’s a good thing.

So is the ability to invalidate laws that violate the constitution. "You can't do that" isn't making law.

The law preventing judicial review in this case violates the Eighth Amendment. If a state passed a law saying "courts can't intervene in First Amendment cases" it'd clearly not pass muster and get struck down; why do you feel it works here?

> The legislature can fix the law to allow revisiting cases or abolish the death penalty, or both. The governor can pardon this man.

And if they do not, the court should step in to fix the Eighth Amendment violation. The Eighth is definitely law, and it definitely applies to all three branches of Oklahoma government.

> The courts already mishandled the case, why do we expect them to fix it?

Why wouldn't we? They do that all the time; again, it's why we have appeals courts.

Then appeal it, but that's not a question this court can answer about this case. They made the decision they have to make. The appeals court is the one that can rule on constitutionality.

This decision was by the appeals court.

> The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals on Thursday denied Richard Glossip’s request to vacate his conviction — despite the fact that the state’s Republican attorney general agreed with the request from Glossip’s lawyers.

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