Draft:Glynn Ray Simmons

Glynn Ray Simmons of Oklahoma is entered into the National Registry of Exonerations as the longest-serving wrongfully convicted man in recorded U.S. history. He served 48 years, one month, and 18 days for a murder that an Oklahoma City judge in 2023 said “by clear and convincing evidence” he did not commit. When his chances for release looked dim, two private Oklahoma attorneys, Joe Norwood and John Coyle, took the case.

Simmons was convicted in 1975 of robbing a liquor store in Edmond, Oklahoma, with another man named Don Roberts. A clerk, Carolyn Sue Rogers, was killed while a customer was shot in the head and survived. There was no surveillance footage, DNA, fingerprinting, or other physical evidence available to authorities. They relied on the memory of the customer, 18-year-old Belinda Brown, who’d suffered a head-shot wound and lived. She’d entered the liquor store with a fake ID intending to buy alcohol.

Former Edmond Police Detective Gary Carson said in 2003 about the crime: “It was a big deal, because Edmond had only recently begun to have any homicides. I had helped process the crime scene myself, and there was little if any usable evidence came from the crime scene.”

Glynn Simmons (left) and attorney Joe Norwood in 2023.

No trigger finger

Edmond at the time had a population of about 16,000 mostly white residents, and the police force was white, too. The news station KFOR-TV from nearby Oklahoma City first began drawing attention to the Simmons case in 2003 and continued to report on the story for 20 years until Simmons's release in 2023. Simmons said to KFOR: “I remember on death row somebody told me, ‘You can always get out of prison, but you can’t get out of the grave.’ So, you know, everyday above ground is a good day.”

As it covered the story, KFOR revealed in 2014 that Janice Smith, sister of the clerk who was murdered, did not believe Simmons was the killer. By the year of Simmons’s release, 14 alibi witnesses on different occasions had given sworn testimony that on the night of the robbery, Simmons was in his hometown of Harvey, Louisiana, where he was known as “Nubs.” It was only later after the robbery and during the investigation that Simmons moved to Oklahoma City for a job.

Simmons was 22 at the time of his conviction while Don Roberts was 21. Simmons at trial was cast as the right-handed trigger man of the two. But Simmons is left-handed, and his right-hand trigger finger was cut off during a childhood incident.

Glynn Simmons in 1975.

The Oklahoma law firms of Joseph Norwood and John Coyle investigated the case and began asking the court to grant Simmons relief on the basis of innocence. Before that, Simmons’s own attempts to argue his case had not succeeded. Joseph Norwood told the media: “[Glynn Simmons] had 50 years stolen from him – the prime earning years of his life, when he could have been getting experiences and developing skills. That was taken from him by no fault of his own.”

Key police records

Prior to this effort on behalf of Simmons, a private investigator uncovered key Edmond Police Department records from the case that weren’t previously available to Simmons and Roberts at trial in 1975. Those reports raised questions about who the surviving customer identified during police lineups as the perpetrators. While Belinda Brown expressed certainty about Simmons and Roberts in court, records showed that she had been less certain than it appeared.

Police records showed that three weeks after the robbery, Brown first identified a man who was not Simmons or Roberts. Psychologists say that human memory of an experience has eroded substantially after three weeks. The first man was cleared through an alibi. But it does not appear from available records that investigators sought to verify Simmons’s own alibi witnesses.

Five weeks after the robbery, witness Belinda Brown identified two new men. But in available reports, it’s not clear whether the two men were Simmons and Roberts or two Oklahoma City brothers who were believed to be connected to two unrelated murders at the time. Brown admitted that one of the perpetrators she “did not see that well.” After picking the second man, Brown hesitated with “I think.”

What we remember

Later during a hearing before the trial, Belinda Brown admitted to identifying two men other than Simmons and Roberts during suspect lineups. But at trial, Brown insisted that didn’t happen. The trial itself lasted two days and had an all-white jury. Simmons and Roberts were initially sentenced to death. But a series of landmark decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1970s led to their death sentences being amended to life in prison.

To help with the case, attorneys for Simmons sought out a PhD psychologist from Texas A&M University named Curt Carlson to review the evidence and court records. In a report, Carlson pointed to numerous studies that challenged the reliability of human memory and called attention to the frequency of false identifications.

Carlson noted that Belinda Brown only glimpsed at the perpetrators during the robbery for a few seconds before she was shot in the head. Further, two perpetrators instead of one with a gun can cause witnesses to miss key details. A second clerk in the store who was left alive and saw the offenders more directly was never able to give concrete identifications.

Belinda Brown also experienced a traumatic brain injury from being shot. And, studies have shown that faces are harder for us to perceive and recall when they’re of a different race. Simmons and Roberts are black, while everyone else in the store during the robbery was white.

Police lineups

Although too late for Glynn Simmons, Oklahoma lawmakers in 2019 passed a new law on police lineups designed to help prevent witness misidentifications. Under the law, the witness and the person administering the lineup must not know if the suspect is present.

Years after the 1975 trial, the prosecutors who were responsible for sending Simmons and Roberts to prison began to show doubts about the case. Prosecutor Robert Mildfelt eventually wrote letters on behalf of Simmons:

“Your case has troubled me these many years, because of the many questions unanswered by the evidence we had. … Quite candidly, it was one of the few cases I have been involved in that the verdict a week later could easily have been different.”

Another prosecutor in the case, Dan Murdock, told the media that “you go with what you got,” and a jury decides the rest: “You know your feelings and attitudes and opinions on things change over the years. Now looking back on it, there are things I’d have done different, sure. … (The jury) relied on eyewitness testimony. But now we’ve seen that’s not always the best (evidence).”

Co-defendant Don Roberts was released on parole in 2008. Simmons refused to make any admissions of guilt. Said Simmons attorney Joe Norwood at one hearing: “He was denied parole repeatedly, in large part because he refused to say he did something that he didn’t do.”

Case gets a new look

Oklahoma lawmakers in 1970 had passed the state’s Post-Conviction Procedure Act, which enabled people like Simmons to ask the court to take a fresh look at their cases. The attorneys for Simmons wrote an application for post-conviction relief on his behalf that cited the 1975 trial transcripts and detailed what was known about the case. They argued that the missing lineup reports were exculpatory evidence that favored Simmons’s innocence:

“By the time Glynn Simmons and Don Roberts came to the attention of authorities, the murder was five weeks old, and the authorities had no leads. The public pressure to solve the case was enormous and undoubtedly weighed on law enforcement. It is logical that the law enforcement professionals may have felt this pressure and been so anxious to charge a suspect that they were desperate. Desperation leads to mistakes being made, and there were clearly mistakes made in this case.”

The application goes on:

“Simmons and Roberts both agreed to speak with the authorities after being arrested. They explained to the detectives where they were at the time of the crime and gave the detectives names and contact information of people to verify the alibis. … The police did not do an investigation into Simmons’s alibi at all.”

Then in 2021, the criminal-justice reality show “Reasonable Doubt” dedicated an episode to the Simmons case. The show is hosted by a former homicide detective and a criminal-defense attorney. They examine the details and come to their own conclusions about innocence claims. A juror from Simmons's original trial begins to show doubt about Simmons’s conviction during an on-camera interview when she learns about the problematic lineups. She was also told that the original prosecutors had doubts about the case. The show’s hosts determined that Simmons was innocent and had been “railroaded.”

Witness 'not available'

Two years later in April of 2023, new Oklahoma City prosecutors reversed course on the Simmons case and asked Judge Palumbo to vacate the 1975 conviction on the basis of the missing lineup reports. Palumbo did so in an order, after which Simmons was released on bond pending a new trial. He touched free soil for the first time in 48 years on July 20, 2023. Simmons told news station KFOR: “I’m free now. It’s indescribable. I did 48 years. … I’m ready to move on and make something of my life.” Then Judge Palumbo dismissed the case entirely in September 2023 after it became clear that the central witness in the case was “not available” for a new trial. The National Registry of Exonerations followed by adding Simmons to its database as the longest-serving exoneree. Inclusion in the database requires “a dismissal of all charges related to the crime for which the person was originally convicted.” The dismissal must also be attributable to new evidence that became available only after the original trial.

At that moment, Simmons was still not considered “innocent” of the robbery and murder under Oklahoma law. Judge Palumbo took that additional step in December of 2023 and found “by clear and convincing evidence that the offense for which Mr. Simmons was convicted, sentenced, and imprisoned ... was not committed by Mr. Glynn Simmons.”

Simmons subsequently became eligible to receive a maximum of $175,000 for the 48 years he served as the result of a wrongful conviction. He was 70 years old and battling cancer at the time of Palumbo’s innocence determination. Simmons told the media in late 2023: “What’s been done can’t be undone. But there can be accountability. That’s what I’m about right now, accountability.”