Oklahoma | It’s 2026. Why Is Richard Glossip Still in Jail?

Nearly a year after the Supreme Court tossed his death penalty conviction, Oklahoma is struggling to retry Glossip. 

Richard Glossip woke up on Christmas morning at the Oklahoma County Detention Center, a 13-story, red-brick tower in downtown Oklahoma City. He did a video visit with his wife Lea, then talked to her on the phone as he was served his dinner tray — a bit of turkey and some instant mashed potatoes. 

It was not how he’d pictured his 1st Christmas after leaving death row. 

Glossip won the victory of a lifetime last February, when the U.S. Supreme Court vacated his conviction, finding that it was rooted in false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. After almost three decades facing execution for a crime he swore he didn’t commit, Glossip hoped the ruling would mark the end of his ordeal. 

But nearly a year later, he was stuck in the county jail with no end in sight. Rather than resolve the case as Glossip’s advocates expected him to do, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who is running for governor, announced that he planned to retry Glossip for 1st-degree murder — and asked a judge to reject his request for bond in the meantime. Although defense lawyers pointed out that their 62-year-old client was not a flight risk and posed no danger to society, prosecutors convinced Oklahoma County District Court Judge Heather Coyle to keep Glossip at the jail — a notoriously overcrowded and filthy facility known as one of the deadliest in the country. 

In the months since, the state has been unable to get its prosecution off the ground. Glossip’s legal team has successfully sought the recusal of every criminal court judge assigned to the case — all of them former prosecutors who once worked for the Oklahoma County District Attorney, the same office that sent Glossip to death row. While the attorney general’s office has accused Glossip’s lawyers of “judge shopping,” an October evidentiary hearing showed the defense attorneys’ concerns over the judges’ impartiality to be well-founded. One judge assigned to the trial, who had originally refused to step down, was revealed to have taken multiple vacations with the original prosecutor in Glossip’s case. 

Nevertheless, each recusal has pushed a potential trial date further into the future. While Glossip has had no choice but to be patient, the wait is taking its toll. The sensory chaos of the county jail is overwhelming for a man who spent decades in isolation on death row. According to Lea, he wears foam earplugs to try to drown out the constant noise, sometimes wrapping a towel around his head. 

The conditions are “absolutely exhausting,” Lea said. And while Glossip is grateful to no longer be under a death sentence, he is now in a kind of “purgatory” — waiting for a trial that seems less likely to happen with each passing day. 

“This is not where we ever expected to be,” she said. 

Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to death for the 1997 murder of hotel owner Barry Van Treese at a rundown Best Budget Inn on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. A 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed admitted to attacking and fatally beating Van Treese with a baseball bat but claimed that Glossip coerced him into committing the crime in exchange for money. Sneed agreed to testify against Glossip in exchange for a life sentence. He remains incarcerated. 

But Sneed’s story was shaky from the start — and the state’s case against Glossip began falling apart from the moment he was sentenced to die. Over the decades that followed, numerous witnesses came forward to counter the state’s portrayal of Sneed as a follower who was powerless to stand up to Glossip, describing him instead as calculating and violent. Glossip’s attorneys also uncovered records revealing that Sneed sought to recant his testimony against Glossip on multiple occasions. 

“Besides Sneed, no other witness and no physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese’s murder.” 

We are in agreement.

Nevertheless, Glossip came close to execution numerous times before Drummond took office in January 2023 and immediately announced that he was launching an independent investigation into the case. Unlike his predecessors, who had aggressively fought back against Glossip’s innocence claims, Drummond expressed concern over the possibility that the case was a miscarriage of justice. The resulting review found myriad red flags — including that prosecutors had hidden key evidence from Glossip’s defense and that Sneed had lied on the stand — convincing Drummond that Glossip’s death sentence should not be carried out. In April 2023, he asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to vacate Glossip’s conviction. 

At the same time, behind the scenes, Drummond was secretly discussing an agreement with Glossip’s longtime attorney, Don Knight, to resolve the case. “Once the conviction is vacated,” Knight wrote to Drummond in an email on April 1, the state would bring a new charge against his client: “a single count of being an Accessory After the Fact.” Glossip “will plead guilty to this charge” and be given credit for time served. Under the terms, Glossip would be entitled to immediate release. 

“We are in agreement,” Drummond replied. 

But in a stunning move, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals rejected Drummond’s request to overturn the conviction. It was not until after the Supreme Court took up Glossip’s case and ruled in his favor almost two years later that the secret deal between Drummond and Knight could finally move forward. According to Knight, all signs pointed to the plan remaining in place after the high court’s decision – Drummond’s office told him to expect Glossip’s release to take place by Easter. 

But that never happened. Instead, on April 22, 2025, Glossip was picked up from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester and driven to Oklahoma City, where he was booked into the county jail just before 3 a.m. In early June, Drummond announced that he would try Glossip for first-degree murder. 

Today, with the race for governor in full swing, Drummond denies that he ever made a deal with Knight. After Knight exposed their emailed agreement in a motion filed this summer — filing a lengthy affidavit detailing how Drummond made the deal “based on his own political calculus” — the attorney general’s office rejected his version of events. “Contrary to defense counsel’s abrupt, new theory, the parties have never reached a plea agreement in this matter,” prosecutors wrote. 

On the Monday after Christmas, Glossip found himself back in court before a new judge. With 6 criminal court judges disqualified from presiding over the retrial, the Oklahoma County Chief District Judge had been forced to step in to move the case forward. He turned to the court’s roster of civil judges and, at a hearing in early December, chose two with experience handling criminal cases. He placed their names into a box and drew District Judge Natalie Mai. 

Appearing in Mai’s courtroom on December 29, Glossip’s legal team requested 2 new court dates in early 2026: 1 on the pending motion asking the court to enforce Knight’s agreement with Drummond — which they maintain is a binding contract — and another once again arguing for Glossip’s release on bond. Mai granted the hearings, scheduling them back to back in mid-February. 

The bond hearing will go first, on February 12. In their new bond motion, the lawyers argue that Judge Coyle should never have kept Glossip in jail awaiting trial. She had presided over his bond hearing “despite having an undisclosed, disqualifying source of bias” — a friendship with Connie Smotherman, the very prosecutor who had been found by the Supreme Court to have committed misconduct. Although Coyle had recused herself from Glossip’s case after conceding the relationship, Glossip was still paying for her decision. 

The new bond motion also argues that Glossip’s health has deteriorated in the months he has spent in the county jail, where, despite repeated requests, he has only seen a doctor once. He has high blood pressure and has developed leg swelling and painful cramps, raising concerns about a possible blood clot. He also has “several soft tissue lumps” in different areas of his body, which have not been properly examined. “His remaining in the jail with a lack of medical attention and treatment puts his life and health at risk,” the lawyers write. 

Finally, the motion reiterates what the lawyers argued at the last bond hearing: Any decision to keep Glossip in jail must be based in part on some kind of evidence that he is guilty of the crime for which he stands accused. But the state has yet to present anything new. Coyle’s order was “directly at odds” with the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning his conviction, which rendered Sneed’s testimony unreliable, the lawyers write. “Because Sneed’s testimony was the only direct evidence of Glossip’s guilt of capital murder, the jury’s assessment of Sneed’s credibility was necessarily determinative here,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the majority. “Besides Sneed, no other witness and no physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese’s murder.” 

This ruling should have been the final nail in the coffin of the state’s case, Glossip’s attorneys argue. But as long as the state of Oklahoma insists on pressing forward using the same evidence as before, the lawyers will seek to put Sneed on the stand. The court “must hold an evidentiary hearing to independently assess Mr. Sneed’s willingness to stand by his testimony and his credibility,” they argue in the new bond motion. 

The Oklahoma attorney general’s office did not respond to a request for comment. With the state’s response to Glossip’s bond motion due in mid-January, there is reason to expect that prosecutors will argue against allowing Sneed on the stand. The state’s star witness has never been able to keep his story straight — and he has tried multiple times to recant his testimony against Glossip. Nearly 30 years after he murdered Van Treese, Sneed may be the one who unravels Oklahoma’s case once and for all.

Source: The Intercept, Liliana Segura, January 1, 2026

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

— Oscar Wilde