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Don Knight: Wayne Fornarant, his first attorney, a privately retained lawyer. I believe he charged $2,500 to do the whole case. That's worse than a public defender. That's horrible. I wouldn't charge that for a DUI. He was an incompetent attorney, is basically what he was. So the whole first trial meant nothing. It truly meant nothing. It was so horrible that it really meant nothing, and it's hard for me to keep explaining that to people, to tell them Richard Glossip really didn't get two trials. He didn't. That first one was not a trial—it was just an accusation with evidence. There was no defense put up to it at all. It was just terrible, and the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals found it to be so and wiped it off the map.So this canard that people put out there that there were two trials is just that—a canard. There's just nothing to it. There was one trial, and it was conducted by public defenders [named Silas Lyman and Wayne Woodyard], and these public defenders were bad public defenders. They did a terrible job. Horrible. No preparation. No investigation. They could have—they had the resources to do it. They just chose not to. They did a terrible job.
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I glossed over it in my first press conference because I hadn't yet talked to the lawyers, or tried to talk to the lawyers. But today, I know what I'm doing, and I've been out there investigating and talking to the witnesses. And now I realize that witness after witness after witness wasn't talked to. And that is simply unacceptable to me. So now I feel fine to say Silas Lyman was a horrible lawyer. The other lawyer in the case, Wayne Woodyard, claims he was just second chair and only did what Silas Lyman told him to do. Look, I don't know—I'm not going to go there. All I know is neither of those lawyers did anything on this case, from what I can tell, to help in any way.Besides the fact that many people believe your client to be innocent, why does this case stand out among other death penalty cases?
The most striking thing about this case, I think, is the choice of then-District Attorney Bob Macy to pursue death in the first place. Bob Macy was notorious. He sought death and got it 54 times. The death penalty in the United States is largely driven by district attorneys, and there are always little pockets of death. Oklahoma City during Bob Macy's time was one of those pockets of death, where you get these prosecutors who always seek it. In this case, whether Richard did it or not, the fact that he had no prior record of any kind whatsoever—that should have disqualified his case as being a death penalty case from the start.
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I let Sister Helen Prejean and Susan Sarandon and those kinds of people worry about that stuff. They're the ones being accused of running the PR campaign. I'm representing my client. The larger question of the death penalty can be on everyone's mind if they want to, but all I care about is my client. But even those who support the death penalty should be looking at this case and saying, "Not this case." If you have a dirty, stinking, rotten child killer, then that's what you want your death penalty for. You don't want this one. This makes the whole thing look bad. If you love the death penalty, this is the worst case in the world for you.What was is it like when Glossip learned about the stay of execution?
We had been talking with him for an hour and 20 minutes. He's a very light-hearted guy, even in the face of death. He was joking about how he shared his last meal with the prison guards. He said, "I got plenty of food here. Let's make a party out of this." He's got a way of staying light in the moment. He told us his mom said he came into the world smiling and by God he was going to make sure he left the world smiling. We were having this conversation with him, and it was almost 12 o'clock. He kept wondering, "When is this court going to rule?" Kathleen and I both said, "I don't know." Then I said, "I do. They're going to rule right now." And they looked at me and said, "How would you know that?"
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Pizza Hut pizza, pepperoni, I think, Long John Silver's fish and chips, and a Wendy's Baconator. That's why he said he could share it. I also don't think he was worried about watching his waistline.What are your expectations for the next couple weeks? Where do you go from here?
I'm heading out to interview another witness. I think it's a pretty good witness, and if he pans out, we will be making another filing with the court. We have a response to file, a reply to the government's response to our petition. We'll make another filing with the court. From there, I don't know. I'm very much taking it one day at a time.What's the outlook for this case?
Well, if I didn't have hope, I wouldn't be getting on a plane tomorrow morning and heading back to Oklahoma. I totally have hope. I always have hope. All I know how to do is keep working right up to the last minute, and that's all I'm going to keep doing.Follow Gavin Jenkins on Twitter.