Vox Sentences: is Oklahoma about to execute an innocent man?

Richard Glossip will be executed tomorrow afternoon — but new evidence keeps coming out suggesting he's innocent; big changes to college financial aid; and an Egyptian-Mexican diplomatic incident.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

The crumbling case against Richard Glossip

Per-Anders Pettersson / Hulton Archive via Getty Images

• Barring a last-minute stay from the courts, Richard Glossip is scheduled to be executed by the state of Oklahoma at 3 pm Central Time on Wednesday.

  [The Marshall Project]

• The name Glossip might be familiar to you from a Supreme Court case he lost earlier this year, in which the court allowed Oklahoma to keep using its experimental lethal-injection drug midazolam despite suggestions that it caused incredibly painful deaths.

  [Vox / Dara Lind and German Lopez]

• Glossip is quite possibly innocent. There's no physical evidence connecting him to the 1997 murder he's convicted of. Glossip was convicted based on the testimony of one man. The man who actually killed Glossip's alleged victim — Justin Sneed — told prosecutors that Glossip had put him up to it.

  [The Intercept / Liliana Segura]

• And Sneed might have lied. Last year, his daughter sent a letter to Oklahoma officials asking them to spare Glossip's life — and saying her father was considering taking back his testimony.

  [O'Ryan Justine Sneed]

• It's the sort of case that one defense lawyer confesses "keeps me up at night."

  [Mimesis Law / Jessica Gabel-Cino]

• On the eve of Glossip's execution, new evidence keeps coming in. Glossip's lawyers have released an affidavit from a man who served with Sneed in prison: "Among all the inmates, it was common knowledge that Justin Sneed lied and sold Richard Glossip up the river."

  [The Intercept / Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith]

• And on Tuesday night, the local Fox affiliate reported that a box of evidence in Glossip's case was destroyed even before courts had ruled on his first appeal.

  [Fox 25 / Phil Cross]

• Despite the new evidence (at least that which was available as of Monday), Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin rejected the request for an executive stay of execution. A court could still order a stay, and allow lawyers to present the new information in court. But they have very, very little time.

  [Phil Cross via Twitter]

A faster FAFSA

Steve Pope/Getty Images

• President Obama announced today that the government's making two big changes to the FAFSA college financial aid form: families will be able to fill out the form for the 2017-18 school year when high school seniors are applying to schools in fall of 2016, and they'll be able to use their 2015 tax forms to do it (instead of having to wait to file their 2016 taxes).

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• Under the old system, students often couldn't submit their final FAFSA forms until a couple of weeks before college decisions were due. With more time to apply for and get aid offers from colleges, the White House is hoping students will apply to schools they might have been afraid they couldn't afford in the past.

• But one school administrator thinks that students knowing more about what colleges they can afford should "scare the daylight out of colleges" — especially those who pride themselves on admitting only a few applicants.

  [Jon Boeckenstedt's Admissions Weblog / Jon Boeckenstedt]

• The FAFSA changes will be especially powerful if used in conjunction with the College Scorecard the Department of Education released over the weekend: a massive database of colleges, their costs, and how much their graduates earn 10 years after enrolling.

  [Department of Education]

• There's an argument that it's not exactly fair to judge colleges based on how much their students make after graduation — especially because, as Vox's Libby Nelson explains, so much of it is out of colleges' control.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• Regardless of whether the database is good at judging what college should be for, though, it's an absolute treasure trove for data journalists. ProPublica has rejiggered the data to show how much debt colleges leave students with — and pointed out that some of the richest schools, like NYU, leave their students with the most debt.

  [ProPublica / Annie Waldman and Sisi Wei]

• And the New York Times graphs the massive gender gap in earnings among elite college grads — male MIT grads make $58,100 more than female grads ten years after graduation, on average.

  [The New York Times / Kevin Carey]

How did Egypt accidentally kill a convoy of Mexican tourists?

Mohamed El-Shahed/AFP/Getty Images

• On Sunday, Egyptian security forces accidentally shot and killed a convoy of tourists (most of them Mexican) and guides in an oasis in the country's western desert.

  [The Guardian / Michael Safi]

• The Egyptian government initially said the tourists were in a "restricted area." But subsequent reports showed that the area in which they were killed was open to the public — and they might even have had a police escort.

  [The Guardian / Michael Safi and Damien Gayle]

• The Egyptian government has since apologized for the killings, which amounted to 12 people in all.

  [BBC ]

• The Mexican government is not satisfied. On Tuesday, its foreign minister traveled to Cairo with relatives of the victims, seeking answers.

  [AFP / Samer al-Atrush]

• It's not clear how the Egyptian government made the mistake. But it's fairly clear why they were armed to begin with: as Evan C. Hill pointed out in a Twitter essay, Egypt is quietly (and bloodily) battling an insurgency in the western desert, and an ISIS affiliate had launched an attack in the area earlier.

  [Evan C. Hill via Twitter]

• There have been 400 insurgent attacks in the region since 2012. To combat them, the Egyptian government has razed 5,000 homes. What the Egyptian government accidentally did is only a little more horrifying than what it's been doing intentionally.

  [BBC / Omar Ashour]

MISCELLANEOUS

39 comedians name their favorite sketches from the late, lamented Key & Peele. [NY Mag]

• CORRECTION: In yesterday's newsletter we referred to the Australian Labour Party. It turns out that while Aussies spell the word labour, they spell the party Labor.

  [Geoff Egan via Twitter]

• Danish game theoreticians argue that serving people who are last in lines first is more efficient than those who came first.

  [Washington Post / Ana Swanson]

• I never know how to feel about these "in the 30s/40s everyone was on meth constantly" stories.

  [The Independent / Tony Paterson]

• A new study suggests that even if your blood pressure meets current guidelines, it could still be much too high.

  [NYT / Gina Kolata]

VERBATIM

"One does not build a safety net for a race of predators. One builds a cage." [The Atlantic / Ta-Nehisi Coates]

• "Female 18-20 any ethnicity. Haven is the communications expert of the team. Her exceptional good looks and athletic ability make it hard to believe that she is the brains of the operation."

  [A real casting notice via NY Mag / Jenny Jaffe]

• "Feminist criticism isn’t about ripping something to shreds or making others feel guilty for liking it. It’s simply about pointing out a specific creative weakness and then taking that a step further to explain the real-world social ramifications of that weakness, all in the hopes of dissuading future filmmakers from making the same mistake."

  [AV Club / Caroline Siede]

• "Contractual obligations include offering German classes, providing special protection for minors and teaching refugees Austrian values such as 'the importance of punctuality and reliability.'"

  [Wall Street Journal / Anton Troianovski, Manuela Mesco, and Simon Clark]

• "REVEAL TO ME YOUR LOVE FOR LAUNDRY! BEHOLD! NOTHING CAN DELAY THE REAPER!"

  [Clickhole]

WATCH THIS

Vox / Estelle Caswell and Joe Posner

• The new frontier of LGBTQ civil rights, explained

  [YouTube / Estelle Caswell and Joe Posner]

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