Richard Glossip Set For Release From Jail After Three Decades Behind Bars

Three decades after he was arrested for a capital crime he swore he didn’t commit – and more than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction – former death row prisoner Richard Glossip has been granted bond by an Oklahoma judge, setting the stage for him to walk free.

In an order handed down on Thursday, Oklahoma County District Judge Natalie Mai set Glossip’s bond at $500,000. She ordered him to live with his wife, wear an electronic monitoring device, abide by a curfew from 10 pm to 7 am, and forbid him from traveling outside the state.  

“We are extremely grateful that Judge Natalie Mai has granted Richard Glossip a bond,” Glossip’s longtime attorney Don Knight wrote in a statement. “In doing so, she rejected the State’s claim that there is a strong case for guilt. For the first time in 29 years of being incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, during which he faced 9 execution dates and ate 3 last meals, Mr. Glossip now has the chance to taste freedom while his defense team continues to pursue justice on his behalf.”

Mai’s decision comes more than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Glossip’s conviction and death sentence based on false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. The momentous victory before the high court seemed certain to mark the end of Glossip’s decades-long ordeal.

But in June 2025, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who is running for governor, announced that he would retry Glossip for first degree murder, opening a new chapter in the protracted legal saga. Glossip has remained in jail ever since.

Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of his boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese, who was brutally killed at the Best Budget Inn on the outskirts of Oklahoma City in January 1997. A 19-year-old handyman named Justin Sneed admitted to fatally beating Van Treese with a baseball bat but insisted that Glossip bullied him into doing it. Sneed’s account became the basis for the state’s case against Glossip – and for a plea deal that allowed Sneed to avoid the death penalty. Sneed is serving a life sentence.

Prosecutors told jurors at Glossip’s 1998 trial that he’d taken advantage of the younger, more vulnerable Sneed, offering him money to kill their boss so that Glossip could take over the motel. “Glossip encouraged, aided and abetted and sent Mr. Sneed off to do his dirty work,” they said.

But this story began falling apart not long after Glossip arrived on death row. A video of Sneed’s police interrogation cast serious doubt on the state’s version of events, revealing coercive questioning by Oklahoma City detectives who pressured Sneed into implicating Glossip. 

Glossip’s conviction was overturned twice. In 2001, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that Glossip’s lawyers had been ineffective for failing to present the interrogation video to jurors. But in 2004, a second jury convicted Glossip and resentenced him to death. More than 20 years later, in February 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court again vacated Glossip’s conviction, finding that Sneed had lied on the stand during Glossip’s retrial – and that prosecutors had failed to correct Sneed’s testimony. This misconduct, combined with “additional conduct by the prosecutor further undermines confidence in the verdict,” the justices wrote.

Glossip came close to execution numerous times, as Oklahoma authorities aggressively defended their conviction despite mounting evidence pointing to his innocence. Drummond, who came into office in 2023, broke with his predecessors and took unprecedented steps to block Glossip’s execution — only to announce months after Glossip’s Supreme Court victory that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder. 

The state has since fought to keep Glossip locked up at the Oklahoma County Jail. At a bond hearing last summer, prosecutors insisted to Oklahoma County Judge Heather Coyle that Glossip is guilty and poses a danger to the community. Coyle ruled in their favor but later stepped down from the case after Glossip’s lawyers discovered that she was close friends with the lead prosecutor at Glossip’s second trial. Five more judges subsequently stepped down from the case due to their own ties to the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office.

Mai’s order granting bond came on the heels of a setback for Glossip’s legal team, who had hoped to resolve the case once and for all. In April, following a daylong hearing in Oklahoma City, Mai declined to enforce a previous agreement between Drummond and Knight that would have allowed Glossip to walk free. After hearing testimony on the matter from Knight and from the Oklahoma solicitor general, Mai sided with the state, ruling from the bench that “the matter should go on for trial.”

In a subsequent motion, Glossip’s lawyers argued that, while Mai may have concluded that the agreement was not enforceable for the purpose of resolving the case, it was still grounds to release Glossip from jail.

“Regardless of the parties’ differing views,” they wrote, “it remains significant that … the Attorney General believed that an appropriate resolution of this case should result in Mr. Glossip’s release from custody. The State’s chief law enforcement officer did not see Mr. Glossip as a dangerous individual who should remain incarcerated, or one against whom the State had proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he was guilty of murder.” 

In a reply brief, Jimmy Harmon, the chief of the criminal justice division of the AG’s office, wrote that in making her decision Mai should not consider anything Drummond has said about the case.

Mai apparently disagreed. In her order, Mai quoted a letter Drummond wrote to the parole board in 2023, expressing his view that the record didn’t support a first-degree murder conviction.

“The Court fully expects that the State will rigorously prosecute its case going forward and the defense will provide robust and effective presentation for Glossip,” Mai wrote. “The Court hopes that a new trial, free of error, will provide all interested parties, and the citizens of Oklahoma, the closure they deserve.”

At Glossip’s most recent bond hearing in February, Harmon alerted the judge that she should not expect anything new from the state at Glossip’s third trial. “The evidence presented will be essentially the same as was presented in the first two trials,” he said. 

This evidence, which was never strong to begin with, has been diminished and discredited in the decades since Glossip was first sent to death row. While Knight has spent more than a decade uncovering new evidence debunking the state’s case, the state is evidently prepared to once again rely on Sneed, whose credibility has been fatally undermined. “Besides Sneed, no other witness and no physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese’s murder,” Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote last year. 

As Mai prepares to preside over a trial based on the same discredited evidence, Glossip, who is now 63, is set to rejoin the free world for the first time in nearly 30 years. “After everything we’ve been through together over the years, knowing that my husband is finally coming home is a feeling I can’t even begin to describe,” his wife Lea said.

Meanwhile, Glossip’s legal team is gearing up for trial “against a system that the United States Supreme Court has found to be guilty of serious misconduct by state prosecutors,” Knight said. “Mr. Glossip is deeply grateful to the many thousands of people who have expressed support for him over the years and now looks forward to the day when he is exonerated and truly free from this decades-long nightmare.”