Opinion | The Supreme Court Should Stop the Glossip Execution

Nearly 90 years ago, in a case involving prosecutorial misconduct, the Supreme Court laid down its view of a prosecutor’s duty, one that has been widely repeated in court decisions ever since.The prosecution’s interest in a criminal prosecution, the court wrote succinctly, “is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.”Elaborating on that proposition, the court went on to say that while a prosecutor “may strike hard blows, he is not at liberty to strike foul ones.

It is as much his duty to refrain from improper methods calculated to produce a wrongful conviction as it is to use every legitimate means to bring about a just one.”As the Supreme Court begins its October term, it will have an important opportunity to demonstrate whether that basic principle of fairness still holds.When I served as Virginia’s attorney general, I tried hard to live up to that principle.In two cases in which I concluded that mistakes were made in the course of obtaining convictions, I admitted to the missteps.

And when I did that, the Virginia courts set aside the tainted convictions and declared the defendants innocent.A case now before the court, Glossip v.Oklahoma, asks the justices to decide whether a man on Oklahoma’s death row deserves a new trial after the state’s attorney general admitted errors that deprived him of a fair trial.Richard Glossip was convicted in 1998 of arranging the murder of his employer, the owner of a motel in Oklahoma City, and sentenced to death.

That decision was reversed on appeal after a court concluded his lawyer was not prepared for trial, and he was retried again in 2004.The outcome was the same.

But following an exhaustive investigation into Mr.Glossip’s second trial nearly two decades later, the state’s attorney general, Gentner Drummond, who was not in office during those trials, concluded that prosecutors had procured Mr.

Glossip’s conviction by unconstitutional and unethical means.We are having trouble ...