Less than a month before he was scheduled to stand trial a third time, accused of a murder he has always sworn he did not commit, Richard Glossip on Thursday agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge, a final step toward bringing his three-decade legal saga to an end.
Glossip, 63, was twice convicted and sentenced to death for the 1997 murder of his boss Barry Van Treese inside Room 102 of the rundown motel the Van Treese family owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. A 19-year-old maintenance man named Justin Sneed admitted to killing Van Treese, but he insisted Glossip put him up to it. Sneed, who is currently serving a life sentence, escaped the death penalty by becoming the star witness against Glossip.
During a brief hearing that was originally scheduled to address pretrial matters, Oklahoma County Court Judge Natalie Mai instead accepted a plea from Glossip to accessory after the fact and dismissed the murder charge against him. With members of Van Treese’s family looking 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 place at the time of the killing, the maximum punishment for accessory after the fact was 45 years. Taking into consideration the decades Glossip spent on death row and credits earned for good behavior, Glossip’s attorneys say he would have been eligible for full release in 2016 and should serve no more time behind bars. But defense lawyers did not reach an agreement with the state as to a proposed sentence. In a statement released after the hearing, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who once expressed deep concerns about the state’s case against Glossip, made clear that his office will be seeking additional prison time.
Ultimately it will be up to Mai to decide if Glossip should be sentenced to time served or if any additional punishment is warranted.
The contours of Glossip’s plea are remarkably similar to a behind-the-scenes agreement made in 2023 between Drummond and Glossip’s lead attorney Don Knight. At the time, Drummond told Knight that if a court were to overturn Glossip’s conviction, he would resolve the case by accepting a plea to accessory after the fact 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 that it was rooted in false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct, Drummond, who by then was running for governor, did an abrupt about-face, announcing he would once again prosecute Glossip for first degree murder.
In the year and a half since then, it has become glaringly apparent that prosecutors from Drummond’s office are grossly ill-equipped to take Glossip’s case to trial. Since his original trial in 1998, the state has lost or destroyed evidence, numerous witnesses have died, and prosecutors have conceded that their own star witness — who has sought to recant his testimony multiple times — can’t actually be expected to remember what happened the night of the killing.
“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 put this matter to rest, Rich pleaded guilty to being an accessory after the fact. We believe Rich has more than paid his debt to society.”
Glossip had originally been charged as an accessory after the fact for initially failing to give police information about the killing. The night Van Treese was killed, Glossip said, Sneed woke him up around 4 a.m. by knocking on the wall of his apartment, which was adjacent to the motel’s office. Standing outside with a black eye, Sneed told Glossip he had chased off some drunks who had broken a window in one of the motel rooms. According to Glossip, he asked Sneed about his black eye, and Sneed flippantly 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. Still, Glossip didn’t tell the cops right away; he said his girlfriend suggested waiting until they figured out what was going on.
But Sneed told police Glossip was the mastermind behind the plot to kill Van Treese, and, with no other evidence tying Glossip to the crime, Sneed’s statement became the basis of the state’s case. At Glossip’s 1998 trial, prosecutors said that he had 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,” then-prosecutor Fern Smith told the jury.
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 defense failed to present the tape to the jury, which led 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 die in 2004, doubts over Glossip’s guilt continued to grow.
Glossip subsequently came close to execution many times and may well have been executed if Drummond hadn’t intervened upon taking office in 2023. He ordered an independent investigation into the case, which concluded that rampant prosecutorial misconduct had infected Glossip’s conviction. Drummond asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn the case. When that failed, joined Glossip in asking the Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that Sneed – whom the state has described as its “indispensable witness” – had lied on the witness stand.
Drummond’s concessions about the flaws in the state’s case and his unprecedented advocacy on Glossip’s behalf made his announcement in June 2025 that he would seek to retry Glossip for murder all the more shocking. According to Glossip’s lawyers, the decision also betrayed the long-standing agreement with Drummond to resolve the case and set Glossip free.
After that, Drummond essentially washed his hands of the case to focus on his ultimately failed attempt to become Oklahoma’s next governor, handing off prosecutorial duties to other lawyers in his office. Prosecutors declared that they intended to use the same discredited evidence to try Glossip a third time and spent months fighting to keep him in jail. Despite those efforts, Mai ordered Glossip’s release.
With a December 2026 trial date looming, tensions between the two sides have ratcheted up. Glossip’s lawyers have complained about prosecutors failing to turn over evidence as required under the 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 advocacy on Glossip’s behalf.
Glossip’s sentencing hearing is scheduled for December 17.
Since his release, Glossip has “been living a peaceful and law-abiding life,” Knight said in his statement. “We look forward to an opportunity to show why returning him to custody would not serve the interests of justice, and to ending this nightmare for Rich and all concerned.”
After the hearing, Glossip and his wife, Lea, stood with Knight to address reporters. Glossip thanked Knight and Lea for their support. “It was a hard day,” Lea told The Intercept, “but Richard and I are both people of faith.” She expressed that “today marks a meaningful step toward finally bringing this case to an end. We are both deeply grateful for the tireless efforts of his legal team.”
#Oklahoma #Drops #Murder #Charge #Richard #Glossip #Avoiding #Trial