Less than one A month before his third trial, accused of a murder he always swore he did not commit, Richard Glossip agreed Thursday to plead guilty to a lesser charge, a final step toward ending his three-decade legal saga.
Glossip, 63, was convicted and sentenced to death twice for the 1997 murder of his boss Barry Van Treese in room 102 of the Van Treese family’s rundown motel in suburban Oklahoma City. Justin Sneed, a 19-year-old maintenance man, admitted to killing Van Treese, but he insisted that Glossip incited him to do it. Sneed, who is currently serving a life sentence, escaped the death penalty by becoming the star witness against Glossip.
During a brief hearing initially scheduled to address pretrial issues, Oklahoma County Court Judge Natalie Mai instead accepted a plea from Glossip to accessory after the fact and dismissed the murder charge against him. As members of Van Treese’s family looked on from their seats in the jury box, Glossip stood to answer a series of routine questions to confirm that his plea was voluntary. Mai did not ask any specific questions about the crime itself.
Under Oklahoma law in effect at the time of the murder, the maximum sentence for accessory after the fact was 45 years. Given Glossip’s decades on death row and credits earned for good behavior, Glossip’s lawyers say he could have been granted full release in 2016 and should serve no more time behind bars. But defense attorneys failed to reach an agreement with the state on the proposed sentence. In a statement released after the hearing, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who had previously expressed deep concerns about the state’s case against Glossip, made clear that his office would seek additional prison time.
Ultimately, it will be up to May to decide whether Glossip should be sentenced to prison or whether additional time is warranted.
The contours of Glossip’s plea are remarkably similar to a behind-the-scenes deal struck in 2023 between Drummond and Glossip’s lead attorney, Don Knight. At the time, Drummond told Knight that if a court overturned Glossip’s conviction, he would resolve the case by accepting an accessory after the fact plea in exchange for time served — and a promise that Glossip would not sue Oklahoma for anything related to his arrest and incarceration.
“We believe Rich has more than paid his debt to society.”
But after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Glossip’s conviction in 2025, finding it was based on perjured testimony and prosecutorial misconduct, Drummond, who was then a candidate for governor, abruptly about-faced, announcing he would prosecute Glossip again for first-degree murder.
Over the past year and a half, it has become clear that prosecutors in Drummond’s office are clearly ill-equipped to bring Glossip’s case to trial. Since his first trial in 1998, the state has lost or destroyed evidence, many witnesses have died and prosecutors have admitted that their own star witness — who has repeatedly tried to recant his testimony — could not actually remember what happened the night of the murder.
“For 30 years, Richard Glossip has maintained his innocence,” Knight said in a statement after the hearing. “After nearly executing him 9 times, the State of Oklahoma has now dismissed the murder charge against him. This morning, to finally bring closure to this case, Rich pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact. We believe Rich has more than paid his debt to society.”
Glossip originally had was charged with accessory after the fact for initially failing to provide police with information about the murder. The night Van Treese was killed, Glossip said, Sneed woke him around 4 a.m. by banging on the wall of his apartment, which was adjacent to the motel office. Standing outside with a black eye, Sneed told Glossip he chased away drunks who had broken a window in one of the motel rooms. According to Glossip, he asked Sneed about his black eye, and Sneed casually replied, “I killed Barry.” »
According to Glossip, it wasn’t until the next morning, when Van Treese was missing, that he realized Sneed might have been serious. However, Glossip didn’t tell the cops right away; he said his girlfriend suggested he wait until they figured out what was happening.
But Sneed told police that Glossip was the mastermind behind the plot to kill Van Treese and, with no other evidence linking Glossip to the crime, Sneed’s statement became the basis of the state’s case. At Glossip’s 1998 trial, prosecutors said he took advantage of the younger, more vulnerable Sneed, offering him money to kill their boss so Glossip could take over the motel. “Glossip encouraged, aided and abetted and sent Mr. Sneed to do his dirty work,” then-prosecutor Fern Smith told the jury.
But that story began to unravel shortly after Glossip arrived on death row. A video of Sneed’s police interrogation has cast serious doubt on the state’s version of events, revealing coercive interrogations by Oklahoma City detectives who pressured Sneed to implicate Glossip.
Glossip’s defense failed to present the recording to the jury, leading an Oklahoma court to overturn Glossip’s first conviction based on ineffective assistance of counsel. Although a second jury convicted him and sent him to death in 2004, doubts about Glossip’s guilt continued to grow.
Glossip subsequently came close to execution on several occasions and may well have been executed had Drummond not intervened when he took office in 2023. He ordered an independent investigation into the case, which concluded that widespread prosecutorial misconduct had infected Glossip’s conviction. Drummond asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn the case. When that failed, he joined Glossip in asking the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that Sneed – who the state described as its “indispensable witness” – had lied on the witness stand.
Drummond’s concessions on flaws in the state’s case and his unprecedented advocacy on Glossip’s behalf made his June 2025 announcement that he would seek to retry Glossip for murder all the more shocking. According to Glossip’s lawyers, the decision also betrays the long-standing agreement with Drummond to resolve the case and release Glossip.
After that, Drummond essentially washed his hands of the case to focus on his ultimately unsuccessful bid to become Oklahoma’s next governor, turning over prosecutorial duties to other attorneys in his office. Prosecutors said they intended to use the same discredited evidence to try Glossip a third time and spent months fighting to keep him in prison. Despite these efforts, Mai ordered Glossip’s release.
As the trial date in December 2026 approaches, tensions between the two sides have intensified. Glossip’s lawyers complained that prosecutors failed to provide evidence as required by law. Prosecutors have tried to limit what the defense can present to jurors at trial regarding the history of the case — including asking Mai to bar any mention of Drummond’s previous plea to Glossip.
Glossip’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for December 17.
Since his release, Glossip “has led a peaceful, law-abiding life,” Knight said in his statement. “We look forward to the opportunity to show why his return to custody would not serve the interests of justice and to bring an end to this nightmare for Rich and everyone involved.”
After the hearing, Glossip and his wife, Lea, stood alongside Knight to speak to reporters. Glossip thanked Knight and Lea for their support. “It was a tough day,” Lea told The Intercept, “but Richard and I are both people of faith. » She said that “today marks a significant step toward the final conclusion of this matter. We are both deeply grateful for the tireless efforts of his legal team.”
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