The Outrageous Conviction of Montez Spradley

By Radley Balko
Sep. 22, 2015

Last week, an Oklahoma appeals court granted death row inmate Richard Glossip a stay of execution about an hour before he was scheduled to die. There’s plenty of evidence casting doubt on Glossip’s guilt, including new evidence his legal team unveiled just last week. (Much of it came from witnesses who came forward after seeing the publicity surrounding Glossip’s nearing execution.) Whenever a death row inmate claims innocence in the waning hours of his life, there’s inevitably a chorus of death penalty supporters who point out that the condemned was convicted by a jury, by the work of police and prosecutors, that the verdict would need to have been upheld by a judge, and then by multiple appeals courts.

But consider the case of Montez Spradley. As Glossip neared his execution, Spradley was enjoying his second week of freedom after nearly a decade in prison. For most of that time, he was on death row. He had been convicted of robbing and killing a woman, Marlene Jason, in 2004.

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