America’s longest-serving exoneree suffers setback in suit against detective

DENVER (CN) — The 10th Circuit on Thursday reversed a lower court’s terse denial of qualified immunity to an Oklahoma City detective who worked the murder case that wrongfully imprisoned Glynn Simmons for 48 years, the longest known sentence for an exoneree in American history.

“Because the district court did not conduct a sufficient qualified immunity analysis, we vacate and remand for the court to fully consider the defense in the first instance,” the federal appeals panel wrote in a nine-page opinion.

The case dates back to Dec. 30, 1974, when Carolyn Sue Rogers was murdered at the liquor store where she worked in Edmond, Oklahoma. Oklahoma City Police Department Detective Claude Shobert helped investigate by conducting lineups of potential perpetrators.

Glynn Simmons was included in one such lineup in February 1975, after he was arrested as a suspect in a different robbery. Even though Simmons moved to Oklahoma in January 1975 and had been living in a different state when Rogers was murdered, prosecutors claimed a survivor of the liquor store attack identified him as one of the attackers.

However, prosecutors failed to disclose that the surviving victim also identified four others across eight lineups, leading to Simmons' exoneration in 2023.

Shobert’s defense attorneys downplayed his involvement in the conviction, but Simmons nevertheless sued the detective along with the cities of Edmond and Oklahoma City in January 2024, claiming violations of his Fourth and 14th Amendment rights.

Although Simmons says Shobert ran the lineups and fabricated the report that drove his conviction, Shobert has no memory of working on the investigation today — meaning just about all of the facts in the case are disputed.

In a succinct four-page opinion, Donald Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Bernard Jones denied Shobert and Oklahoma City shields from liability in March 2025, prompting their appeal.

Given how long Simmons had been incarcerated and his declining state of health, his attorney Elizabeth Wang urged the panel during oral argument to simply review the case de novo and disregard the lower court's opinion if they found it insufficient.

Instead, the three-judge panel chose to remand, instructing the lower court to redo the assignment and show its work.

"We are mindful of the evidentiary difficulties the district court faces in conducting this analysis,” the panel wrote in an opinion more than double the length of the one it reviewed. “Still, the normal summary judgment standard applies. The court should identify which facts are material to Shobert’s qualified immunity defense on each claim and explain their materiality."

The panel included Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Timothy Tymkovich, a George W. Bush appointee, along with Trump-appointed U.S. Circuit Judges Alison Eid and Joel M. Carson.

Over the phone, Wang told Courthouse News she doesn't expect the remand to change the results.

"I don't think the district court is going to change its mind. It's just going to have to issue a more detailed opinion," said Wang, who practices with Loevy & Loevy in Boulder, Colorado. "We still expect to prevail, it just is going to be an extra step in the road to getting the result that Mr. Simmons deserves."

Facing civil suit, the city of Edmond settled with Simmons, agreeing to pay $7.5 million. The state also paid Simmons $175,000 in December 2023.

The 1975 jury convicted Simmons along with codefendant Don Roberts for Rogers’ murder, and sentenced them both to death. Simmons and Roberts were spared execution only because the state’s death penalty law failed to meet standards set by the 1976 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Gregg v. Georgia, causing their sentences to be commuted to life.

Roberts, who maintains his innocence, was paroled in 2008. His conviction remains on the books.

Attorney Stacey Felkner, who represents Shobert from Collins Zorn in Oklahoma City, did not respond to Courthouse News' inquiry for comment.

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