Oklahoma | His murder conviction was thrown out, but Richard Glossip will stay in prison while he waits for a new trial, judge rules

A judge on Wednesday denied bond for former Oklahoma death row inmate Richard Glossip, keeping him in custody while he awaits a retrial after the US Supreme Court tossed his conviction and death sentence in the 1997 killing of his former boss, according to court records.

District Judge Heather Coyle said in the order that the “State has sufficiently shown by clear and convincing evidence that the presumption of the defendant’s guilt of a capital offense is great.”

The order comes after a hearing on Glossip’s motion to set bond on June 17. During the hearing, the state presented as witness a communications specialist from the Oklahoma County Detention Center, where Glossip is being held.

Glossip’s attorney declined to comment on the judge’s decision Wednesday.

The ruling is the latest twist in the legal saga surrounding Glossip, who has been scheduled for execution nine times and has eaten his last meal three times only to have his execution stayed.

After nearly three decades maintaining his innocence on Oklahoma’s death row and the emergence of new evidence in recent years, the US Supreme Court in February tossed Glossip’s conviction and death sentence. The Glossip case is arguably the highest-profile death penalty case to reach the court in years.

“We conclude that the prosecution violated its constitutional obligation to correct false testimony,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the majority.

The court ordered that Glossip receive a new trial, finding prosecutors failed to correct false testimony that may have influenced his jury. Then, Oklahoma prosecutors said last month they would retry the longtime death row inmate a third time for his role in the killing of his former boss.

Since Glossip’s 1998 conviction as the alleged orchestrator of a murder-for-hire scheme targeting his boss, Oklahoma City motel owner Barry Van Treese, a raft of issues with his prosecution has surfaced, coinciding with a shift of political winds now at the inmate’s back.

The fight to spare Glossip’s life – which has drawn national attention – has been largely helmed by pro-death penalty Republicans, most notably Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond: He and others have said it’s important Oklahomans have faith the death penalty is fairly administrated, and that Glossip’s execution would erode trust in the state’s justice system, given the questions surrounding his case.

Drummond in June announced that he intends to pursue a new murder trial against Glossip on a first-degree murder charge. Drummond said that he would seek a sentence of life in prison for Glossip instead of the death penalty.

“While it was clear to me and to the U.S. Supreme Court that Mr. Glossip did not receive a fair trial, I have never proclaimed his innocence,” Drummond said in a news release at the time. “After the high court remanded the matter back to district court, my office thoroughly reviewed the merits of the case against Richard Glossip and concluded that sufficient evidence exists to secure a murder conviction.”

Allegations surfaced that the state withheld evidence related to its star witness.

Glossip’s conviction rested on testimony from Van Treese’s actual killer, Justin Sneed, who got a life sentence in exchange for a guilty plea and for testifying against Glossip. Sneed’s testimony was the sole evidence linking Glossip, the motel’s manager, to the killing.

In its February decision, the Supreme Court found prosecutors had not corrected false testimony Sneed provided at trial; had they, his credibility would have suffered, undercutting his testimony – the lodestar of the prosecution’s case.

“That correction would have revealed to the jury not just that Sneed was untrustworthy (as amicus points out, the jury already knew he repeatedly lied to the police), but also that Sneed was willing to lie to them under oath,” Sotomayor wrote.

Years after Sneed’s testimony, the state disclosed evidence that Sneed was treated for a serious psychiatric condition. Notes taken by prosecutors indicate they knew that Sneed’s diagnosis and treatment at the time of Glossip’s trial and, according to Glossip’s supporters, hid that information from his defense.

The high-profile murder case dates back to 1997

Glossip’s case dates to January 7, 1997, when Van Treese, a 54-year-old father of seven, was beaten to death at his motel by Sneed, then 19, court records state. At the time, Sneed was staying at the motel while doing maintenance work in exchange for a room.

Glossip, after initially denying knowledge of the killing, eventually admitted Sneed had told him about killing Van Treese. He said he had feared telling the truth because failing to notify police immediately might mean he was “already involved in it.”

Glossip was at first charged with accessory after the fact. But Sneed implicated Glossip, saying he asked Sneed to kill Van Treese so he could run the motel himself. His charge was upgraded to capital murder, and when Glossip refused a deal for a life sentence, insisting on his innocence, prosecutors offered Sneed the same deal. At trial, they cast Glossip as the engineer of the murder-for-hire plot.

Glossip was convicted and sentenced to death in 1998, but that initial outcome was overturned on appeal due to ineffective counsel. He was retried in 2004 and was again convicted and sentenced to die.

Years later, however – after two independent investigations cast serious doubt on Glossip’s conviction – the state disclosed evidence that Sneed told prosecutors he was under the care of a jail psychiatrist who had diagnosed him with bipolar disorder and prescribed him lithium.

But when Sneed claimed at trial he had never seen a psychiatrist and the lithium was prescribed after he asked for cold medicine, prosecutors did not correct him.

After the Supreme Court decision, Glossip’s attorney, Don Knight, told CNN he “will now be given the chance to have the fair trial that he has always been denied.”

“Since 1997, a lot has happened and the prosecution’s case over the years has not gotten better,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

The Van Treese family said at the time they were “confident” a new trial would return the same verdict as those reached in Glossip’s first two trials.

Source: CNN, Brynn Gingras, Dalia Faheid,Linh Tran, July 24, 2025

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde

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