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Less than a<\/span> 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.<\/p>\n Glossip, 63, was twice convicted and sentenced to death<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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<\/a> released after the hearing, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who once expressed deep concerns about the state\u2019s case against Glossip, made clear that his office will be seeking additional prison time.<\/p>\n Ultimately it will be up to Mai to decide if Glossip should be sentenced to time served or if any additional punishment is warranted.<\/p>\n The contours of Glossip\u2019s plea are remarkably similar to a behind-the-scenes agreement<\/a> made in 2023 between Drummond and Glossip\u2019s lead attorney Don Knight. At the time, Drummond told Knight that if a court were to overturn Glossip\u2019s conviction, he would resolve the case by accepting a plea to accessory after the fact in exchange for time served \u2013 and a promise that Glossip would not sue Oklahoma for anything related to his arrest and incarceration.<\/p>\n \u201cWe believe Rich has more than paid his debt to society.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n But after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned<\/a> Glossip\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n In the year and a half since then, it has become glaringly apparent that prosecutors from Drummond\u2019s office are grossly ill-equipped to take Glossip\u2019s case to trial. Since his original trial in 1998, the state has lost or destroyed evidence<\/a>, numerous witnesses have died, and prosecutors have conceded<\/a> that their own star witness \u2014 who has sought to recant his testimony multiple times \u2014 can\u2019t actually be expected to remember what happened the night of the killing.<\/p>\n \u201cFor 30 years, Richard Glossip has maintained his innocence,\u201d Knight said in a statement after the hearing. \u201cAfter 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Glossip had originally<\/span> 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<\/a>, Sneed woke him up around 4 a.m. by knocking on the wall of his apartment, which was adjacent to the motel\u2019s 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, \u201cI killed Barry.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Glossip, it wasn\u2019t until the next morning, when Van Treese was missing, that he realized Sneed might have been serious. Still, Glossip didn\u2019t tell the cops right away; he said his girlfriend suggested waiting until they figured out what was going on.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s statement became the basis of the state\u2019s case. At Glossip\u2019s 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. \u201cGlossip encouraged, aided and abetted and sent Mr. Sneed off to do his dirty work,\u201d then-prosecutor Fern Smith told the jury.<\/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.<\/p>\n Glossip\u2019s defense failed to present the tape to the jury, which led an Oklahoma court to overturn Glossip\u2019s first conviction based on ineffective assistance of counsel. Although a second jury convicted him and sent him to die in 2004, doubts over Glossip\u2019s guilt continued to grow<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n