From her perch on the witness stand, 81-year-old Fern Smith cast a flinty stare at the defense attorney standing before her. Once a veteran prosecutor at the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office, she wore a black chiffon scarf, gold earrings, and an obstinate air, her gray hair pulled back in a tight bun. She did not look at Richard Glossip, sitting across the Oklahoma City courtroom alongside his lawyers. Smith had last seen him more than two decades earlier, not long after convincing a jury to sentence him to die.

“You’re here under a subpoena, correct?” defense attorney Corbin Brewster began. It was October 30, 2025. Smith was the last witness at an evidentiary hearing that started at 10 a.m. The U.S. Supreme Court had overturned Glossip’s conviction eight months earlier, only for Oklahoma’s attorney general to announce he would retry Glossip for murder. But two criminal court judges had since recused themselves from the case, both on the grounds that, as former Oklahoma County prosecutors, they might appear too close to the office that sent Glossip to death row. Now Glossip’s attorneys were seeking the recusal of a third judge, Susan Stallings for the same reason — and in particular, due to her links to Smith, the original prosecutor in the case.

Stallings had already conceded that she worked under Smith in the early 1990s and credited her as a formative influence. She’d also reluctantly volunteered that she traveled with Smith on a group trip to Spain in 1997 — the same year Glossip was charged with a murder he swore he did not commit. But Stallings insisted that this was the extent of her relationship with Smith. And she maintained that she did not need to step down from the case.

Glossip’s lawyers were unconvinced. Although Stallings said she hadn’t spoken to her old mentor in decades, the two had seen each other as recently as April 2025, at a court hearing to investigate alleged misconduct in the case of a different man Smith sent to death row, 46-year-old Tremane Wood. Testifying at that hearing, Smith denied she’d done anything wrong — and Stallings, the presiding judge, found her testimony persuasive, ruling against Wood and setting him up for execution. He is scheduled to die on November 13.

To Glossip’s attorneys, the Wood hearing was a cautionary tale. To probe whether Stallings had disclosed the full details of her relationship with Smith, they sent Smith a subpoena in advance of Glossip’s October hearing that included a request for emails, text messages, and any other documented communications between the two women since Stallings was elected to the bench in 2018. “Did you bring any documents with you?” Brewster asked.

No, Smith replied. “I don’t have any of the documents that you requested.” In fact, she didn’t bother to look. “I don’t have to,” she told Brewster matter-of-factly. “I know I didn’t have any.”

Smith’s casual disregard of the subpoena was startling. But then, it had already been a strange, tense day in court. Stallings was both the subject of the recusal hearing and the presiding judge, which made for an uneasy — sometimes bizarre — dynamic. Although the hearing primarily concerned her own judicial obligations, the discussion repeatedly returned to the question of Smith’s ethical lapses. It was Smith, after all, who “originated the State’s theory, decided to pursue the death penalty, oversaw key early investigative decisions, and controlled the flow of evidence to the defense” in Glossip’s case, defense lawyers wrote in their recusal motion. The result was a prosecution that had been flimsy and corrupted from the start.

Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of his boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese, who was brutally murdered 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. His account became the basis for the state’s case against Glossip – and for a plea deal that allowed Sneed to avoid the death penalty. At Glossip’s 1998 trial, Smith told jurors that he’d 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,” she said.

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. At the recusal........

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