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Three decades after<\/span> he was arrested for a capital crime he swore he didn\u2019t commit \u2013 and more than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction \u2013 former death row prisoner Richard Glossip has been granted bond by an Oklahoma judge, setting the stage for him to walk free.<\/p>\n In an order handed down on Thursday, Oklahoma County District Judge Natalie Mai set Glossip\u2019s 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.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe are extremely grateful that Judge Natalie Mai has granted Richard Glossip a bond,\u201d Glossip\u2019s longtime attorney Don Knight wrote in a statement. \u201cIn doing so, she rejected the State\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Mai\u2019s decision comes more than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Glossip\u2019s conviction<\/a> 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\u2019s decades-long ordeal. <\/p>\n But in June 2025, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who is running for governor, announced that he would retry Glossip<\/a> for first degree murder, opening a new chapter in the protracted legal saga. Glossip has remained in jail ever since.<\/p>\n It\u2019s unclear when Glosip will be released.<\/p>\n Glossip was twice<\/span> 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\u2019s account became the basis for the state\u2019s case against Glossip \u2013 and for a plea deal that allowed Sneed to avoid the death penalty. Sneed is serving a life sentence.<\/p>\n Prosecutors told jurors at Glossip\u2019s 1998 trial that he\u2019d taken advantage of the younger, more vulnerable Sneed, offering him money to kill their boss so that Glossip could take over the motel. \u201cGlossip encouraged, aided and abetted and sent Mr. Sneed off to do his dirty work,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But this story began falling apart not long after Glossip arrived on death row. A video of Sneed\u2019s police interrogation cast serious doubt on the state\u2019s version of events, revealing coercive questioning by Oklahoma City detectives who pressured Sneed into implicating Glossip.\u00a0<\/p>\n Glossip\u2019s conviction was overturned twice. In 2001, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that Glossip\u2019s 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\u2019s conviction, finding that Sneed had lied on the stand during Glossip\u2019s retrial \u2013 and that prosecutors had failed to correct Sneed\u2019s testimony. This misconduct, combined with \u201cadditional conduct by the prosecutor further undermines confidence in the verdict,\u201d the justices wrote.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> unprecedented<\/a> steps<\/a> to block Glossip\u2019s execution \u2014 only to announce<\/a> months after Glossip\u2019s Supreme Court victory that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder.\u00a0<\/p>\n The state has since fought to keep Glossip locked up at the Oklahoma County Jail. At a bond hearing last summer<\/a>, prosecutors insisted to Oklahoma County Judge Heather Coyle that Glossip is guilty and poses a danger to the community. Coyle ruled in their favor<\/a> but later stepped down from the case after Glossip\u2019s lawyers discovered that she was close friends with the lead prosecutor at Glossip\u2019s second trial. Five more judges subsequently stepped down from the case due to their own ties to the Oklahoma County District Attorney\u2019s Office.<\/p>\n Mai\u2019s order granting bond came on the heels of a setback for Glossip\u2019s 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<\/a> 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 \u201cthe matter should go on for trial.\u201d<\/p>\n In a subsequent motion, Glossip\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cRegardless of the parties\u2019 differing views,\u201d they wrote, \u201cit remains significant that \u2026 the Attorney General believed that an appropriate resolution of this case should result in Mr. Glossip\u2019s release from custody. The State\u2019s 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In a reply brief, Jimmy Harmon, the chief of the criminal justice division of the AG\u2019s office, wrote that in making her decision Mai should not consider anything Drummond has said about the case.<\/p>\n Mai apparently disagreed. In her order, Mai quoted a letter Drummond wrote to the parole board<\/a> in 2023, expressing his view that the record didn\u2019t support a first-degree murder conviction.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Court fully expects that the State will rigorously prosecute its case going forward and the defense will provide robust and effective presentation for Glossip,\u201d Mai wrote. \u201cThe Court hopes that a new trial, free of error, will provide all interested parties, and the citizens of Oklahoma, the closure they deserve.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAfter everything we\u2019ve been through together over the years, knowing that my husband is finally coming home is a feeling I can\u2019t even begin to describe.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n At Glossip\u2019s most recent bond hearing<\/a> in February, Harmon alerted the judge that she should not expect anything new from the state at Glossip\u2019s third trial. \u201cThe evidence presented will be essentially the same as was presented in the first two trials,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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<\/a> debunking the state\u2019s case, the state is evidently prepared to once again rely on Sneed, whose credibility has been fatally undermined. \u201cBesides Sneed, no other witness and no physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese\u2019s murder,\u201d Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n