This case has been an anecdotal part of my life for as long as I can remember.

I grew up next door to the Van Treese family. I was only 4 when this happened and Barry's (the victim) youngest son was my best friend at the time; he would have been 5. When they moved ~8 years later, my parents ended up buying their house as a rental property. Toss in some weird life events and my own mothers death, and now many years later my dad is engaged to Donna (Barry's widow). So basically, I've been very close to this family my entire life. I'm not really sure if it's appropriate for me to be mentioning this stuff in such a public forum, but I felt the need to preface my opinion.

Here is a picture of the family that was violently shattered by Justin Sneed.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the death penalty. I believe that we should strive to be better than the killers we are executing. Additionally, in its current incarnation, the death penalty is irrefutably more expensive for taxpayers than life in prison.

I really didn't have much interest in this until it blew up recently. All of my exposure to this had been from the family's perspective, so I just knew that one guy was in jail and the other guy was getting the death penalty. Donna told me several weeks ago that she had been contacted by the Dr. Phil show asking her to appear on an episode with Susan Sarandon to talk about Glossip's case and the murder. She declined the interview, but the episode still took place.. I haven't watched it yet. I was very intrigued by the national attention the case was getting, so I really started doing some reading about Sneed and Glossip.

From what I gather, the only direct evidence against Glossip is Sneed's testimony. All other evidence is circumstantial and mostly flaky, in my opinion. Glossip and Sneed both had large sums of cash on them. Glossip claims the cash was from cashing his paycheck and selling some furniture he had bought. Why was no effort made to question the people he had sold the furniture to? Why did Sneed not mention Glossip at all until after he had already been interrogated several times? Why is one man's life being exchanged for another's plea bargain? This site, while obviously advocating for Glossip, has several points that offer an alternative perspective to what happened.

On the flip side, Glossip was in a position of total power over Sneed. Sneed is mentally handicapped and worked at the motel for Glossip. Sneed received no pay, but Glossip let him in live in a room and fed him in exchange for performing maintenance on the motel. Glossip was Sneed's lifeline, so it looks very bad for Glossip.

Criminal convictions are supposed to be beyond reasonable doubt. I see a lot of reasonable doubt. If you look through the case documents online, you will find all sorts of strange legal happenings and questionable prosecution tactics, especially with the first trial. I realize that the first trial was completely thrown out, but there is still too much going on here to be without reasonable doubt. Some may claim that there are always too many unanswered questions with cases like this, and that we will never know all the answers, but I still see reasonable doubt.

Sorry for the long post, I'm usually just a lurker.