Inside her chambers at the Oklahoma County Courthouse, Judge Susan Stallings was defending her refusal to step down from the third trial of Richard Glossip when she made a startling admission to his defense attorneys.

It was September 4, 2025, and Glossip’s legal team had just persuaded a different judge to recuse herself from the case — the second Oklahoma City judge to do so since August. Like Stallings, both judges were former prosecutors. Both had stepped down due to their ties to the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office. Now Stallings was explaining why she believed that she could be impartial in presiding over the high-profile trial.

To do so, however, Stallings needed to address her relationship with Fern Smith, the former Oklahoma City prosecutor who first sent Glossip to death row. Glossip’s lawyers already knew that Stallings had worked for Smith during her own time at the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office in the early 1990s. And they knew that Stallings had gone on to praise Smith as a formative influence. “When I started in the DA’s office right out of law school, Fern Smith taught me that we were to seek justice — not just convictions,” Stallings told Briefcase, a publication of the Oklahoma County Bar Association, upon taking the bench in 2019. “I’ve never forgotten that.”

But now Stallings was volunteering a new bit of information about her connection to Smith.

“We got a really good deal on the airfare.”

“We took a trip,” Stallings told the lawyers. “There was a group of us that took a trip.” The year was 1997, and Glossip had recently been charged with masterminding the brutal killing of his boss, Barry Van Treese, at an Oklahoma City motel. The evidence against Glossip was thin; prosecutors were relying on the word of a 19-year-old motel employee named Justin Sneed, who admitted to beating Van Treese to death with a baseball bat but claimed that Glossip had coerced him into doing it. As Glossip sat in the county jail insisting he was innocent, Stallings was apparently vacationing in Spain with Smith, the lead prosecutor in the case.

If the judge’s revelation supported the case for her recusal, Stallings seemed intent on downplaying its significance. The vacation had included a bunch of people from the DA’s office, she explained. “We got a really good deal on the airfare.” The colleagues landed in Madrid and rented cars to drive to Costa del Sol and Gibraltar. During the ride to Gibraltar, Stallings said, Smith “wasn’t even in the same car with me.”

Defense attorney Corbin Brewster asked Stallings if she had discussed any of the cases Smith was handling at the DA’s office while they were in Spain. “Good Lord no,” Stallings replied. “That’s not the point of a vacation.”

The exchange between Stallings and Glossip’s attorneys took place during a closed-door proceeding known as a Rule 15 hearing, whose purpose is to ask a judge to recuse themselves from a case. A transcript is attached to a subsequent defense motion reiterating the recusal request and arguing that “there is an objectively and constitutionally intolerable risk that Judge Stallings cannot impartially judge issues that must be addressed before this case can proceed.” Under Oklahoma’s Code of Judicial Conduct, judges are supposed to be disqualified from cases “whenever the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” But the decision to recuse is up to the judge.

All trials are supposed to be overseen by an independent arbiter who can be fair to both sides. This would seem especially urgent in Glossip’s case, which has famously laid bare

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