A watcher of true-crime reality shows might say that evidence, witnesses, and juries are the biggest factors in a court case.
But there’s another crucial variable.
That’s the judge.
In America, our courts are compelled to exercise fairness and impartiality toward both sides of a given case. For a good judge, facts and the law should come before feelings and emotions.
Judges are trained to pursue the truth, not make intuitive guesses.
In fact, how much public trust we have in the legal system is determined in part by how we perceive judges. We expect them to possess integrity and honesty.
Enlightened
The picture in Oklahoma’s courtrooms, however, does not always reflect these ideals.
Judges don’t rule the same way even in the same cases involving the same crimes – let alone in cases that are obviously similar.
“Circuit split” is what the federal courts call it when federal appellate judges hand down competing opinions. It can create major headaches.
Circuit splits can lead to laws that are differently applied in different areas of the country. They can promote unfairness and erode the public’s trust in the justice system.
So perhaps feelings and emotions do make their way into rulings on the same or similar legal questions.
The public image of a judge is one of an enlightened overseer. But our clients experienced a different reality.
See their stories below.
Protector
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Let Norwood.Law be your voice and tell your side of the story in court.
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Shooter
While our client Glynn Simmons was eventually declared innocent, his co-defendant in the very same case, Don Roberts, was not. Judges are to blame.
Glynn Simmons and Don Roberts were convicted together in 1975 of robbing an Oklahoma City liquor store and shooting a clerk to death. Decades later, it became our highest-profile case.
A store customer was shot but survived. She emerged as the case’s only witness and later admitted that she saw the perpetrators for only a few seconds.
There was never any physical evidence in the case.
Glynn Simmons and Don Roberts were nonetheless convicted and sent to death row. The two men spent years and years in confinement trying to prove their innocence.
Eventually, Glynn Simmons found his way to Joe Norwood and Norwood.Law.
Suddenly, the case looked hopeful.
Relief
Glynn Simmons and Don Roberts together were sent to die for the same crime in 1975.
Today, both Simmons and Roberts are free. But only Don Roberts has never been formally declared innocent.
Roberts and Simmons applied separately for declarations of innocence. Their applications were sent to two different judges.
Theses two judges did not view the case the same way.
By this time, Don Roberts had already been out of prison for years while Glynn Simmons remained behind bars.
After 33 years in prison, Don Roberts had grown tired of waiting for justice. He agreed in 2008 to a strict deal with prosecutors in exchange for his release.
Prejudice
Don Roberts was no doubt thrilled by the possibility of seeing sunlight again. But in exchange, Roberts would also have to endure life on parole, live as a convicted felon, and be eligible for only limited pay opportunities.
His co-defendant, Glynn Simmons, never made such a deal for his freedom.
Not until years later in 2023 did Oklahoma County District Court Judge Amy Palumbo dismiss the case against Glynn Simmons with prejudice, meaning the decision was permanent and Simmons would know freedom again.
That ruling from Judge Palumbo also meant Simmons had broken the record in America – 48 years – for time served due to a wrongful conviction.
That’s when co-defendant Don Roberts decided that he, too, wanted an innocence declaration.
Surely that wouldn’t be a problem if Roberts and Simmons were convicted of the same crime.
Experienced
But there was a problem. The road for Don Roberts was blocked.
Throughout the final chapter of his case, Glynn Simmons had the same judge.
Not so for Don Roberts. He was assigned to three different judges over several months. The judge for Glynn Simmons had studied his case. Surely she would declare Don Roberts innocent, too.
But after Simmons was freed, his judge was removed from the case and would not be deciding the fate of Don Roberts.
Instead, Oklahoma County District Judge Lydia Green was appointed in August of 2025.
Then, yet another judge, Kathryn Savage, was appointed the following month.
Judge Savage then rejected the innocence plea of Don Roberts despite the one granted to Glynn Simmons for the same crime.
Bias
Three law experts in 2023 wrote on the issue of judicial fairness. They said judges can only be truly fair when they recognize the threat of hidden cognitive biases that affect our decisions without us consciously knowing it:
“The public’s trust of the judicial branch – state and federal – is fundamentally dependent on the perception that judges are unfailingly impartial. And that rests on a judge’s ability to anticipate and minimize the biases that are part of human nature. As Justice Benjamin Cardozo cautioned, ‘there is no guarantee of justice except the personality of the judge.’”
Naturally occurring mental errors like confirmation bias and tunnel vision make it easy to ignore information that conflicts with our already-reached conclusions.
Rather than search for the truth as it is in the natural world, we engineer truthiness that makes us feel right and feel certain even when we’re painfully wrong.
Recanters
Other Norwood.Law clients know all about the hidden power of judges.
Tulsa police investigators took little time in 1990 deciding that our client, Corey Atchison, was guilty of a shooting death in Tulsa.
Atchison had been in prison for years by the time his case found its way to Norwood.Law and Joe Norwood. We eventually got Atchison freed in 2019.
Descriptions given to police by three eyewitnesses of the shooter didn’t match Corey. Three witnesses recanted their claims that Atchison committed the crime and said they were coerced by the government.
On Atchison’s behalf, we later filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Tulsa:
“[Atchison] has been deprived of all the basic pleasures of human experience, which all free people enjoy as a matter of right, including the freedom to live one’s life as an autonomous human being.”
While Atchison today lives on the outside, Norwood.Law wasn’t done.
Brothers
It’s near-impossible to believe, but Corey Atchison’s own brother was sent to prison for 20 years in an entirely separate wrongful-conviction case stemming from a 1994 Tulsa drive-by murder.
The brother, Malcolm Scott, and co-defendant Demarchoe Carpenter, were convicted in a case closely resembling the one that ensnared Corey Atchison.
In the Carpenter and Scott case, two key witnesses eventually recanted their statements against the men, while a new suspect confessed to carrying out the drive-by with two others.
The true shooter had already been in prison for a different, brutal murder. He admitted committing the drive-by but only after Scott and Carpenter had spent two decades in prison for the crime.
Portraits
Demarchoe Carpenter and Malcolm Scott were finally declared innocent and released in 2016.
In their later federal lawsuit we filed, the judge ruled that the city of Tulsa would be kept in the suit as a defendant. City officials later agreed to a $15 million settlement with Scott and Carpenter.
In the Atchison lawsuit by comparison, a different federal judge ruled that the city of Tulsa would be removed as a defendant.
So while a major settlement was reached in the Carpenter and Scott lawsuit, no settlement has been made for our client Corey Atchison where the city of Tulsa got to walk away.
The facts in these cases closely mirror one another.
In both, there was never any physical evidence.
In both, prosecutors painted grim portraits of our clients in the courtroom.
In both cases, witnesses said they were coerced and recanted their testimony against our clients.
Joseph M. Norwood is a Tulsa attorney with the courtroom expertise you need. Contact his office at 918-582-6464.