To hear lawyer Christopher G. Michel tell it, the case against Richard Glossip is straightforward. Glossip, who has been on death row in Oklahoma for more than two decades for the brutal 1997 murder of his boss, is clearly guilty, Michel says, and there is no reason for the U.S. Supreme Court to stand in the way of his execution.

More than that, Michel argues that the court should be willing to force Oklahoma to carry out an execution that even its attorney general opposes.

Ordinarily, a state’s attorney general would be the one arguing to the high court that an execution should move forward. But since virtually the moment he took office in January 2023, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond has taken unprecedented action to spare Glossip’s life. In Drummond’s view, the case against Glossip was so tainted by prosecutorial misconduct that his conviction should be overturned.

Drummond told the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals as much last year, when he came forward to ask the court to vacate Glossip’s conviction and order a new trial. The court rejected the overture, however, clearing the way for Glossip’s execution. Glossip appealed to the Supreme Court for intervention, an effort that Drummond joined. As such, there was no one from Oklahoma arguing in favor of killing Glossip. Enter Michel.

Michel, a partner at the white shoe law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and co-chair of its national appellate practice, has argued before the court 10 times. He was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush and collaborated on his memoir. More importantly, Michel worked as a law clerk to Chief Justice John Roberts and to Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was a jurist on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. When it became clear no one would defend the Oklahoma court’s ruling, Roberts tapped Michel to take on the job.

While it is extraordinary for a state attorney general to decline to defend a death sentence before the Supreme Court, it’s not entirely unusual for the court to appoint an outside advocate for a position not otherwise represented in a case. Michel, a seasoned Supreme Court litigator with impeccable conservative credentials, was well positioned for the job.

In a brief filed on July 8, Michel took on the task with gusto — even if his recitation of the facts of Glossip’s case, and of the lower court’s ruling, was misleading and incomplete. Michel argues that the court should pay no mind to Drummond’s concerns about the legality of executing Glossip. “Nothing in the Constitution compels a state court to provide a particular measure of deference to a state official’s confession of error,” Michel wrote. In other words, it doesn’t matter how flawed Drummond believes the case is, the court is under no obligation to take those concerns seriously.

Oral arguments in the case are expected to happen in the fall, with a decision unlikely to come before spring 2025. For Glossip, the court’s ruling could ultimately determine whether he lives or dies. But it could also have far-reaching consequences for criminal defendants across the country. Michel relies on arguments that dismiss long-standing protections against prosecutorial misconduct and the courts’ obligation to address it. In doing so, Michel encourages the justices to, at best, disregard decades of legal precedent meant to ward off wrongful convictions or, at worst, to undo them.

© The Intercept