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Richard Glossip Set For Release From Jail After Three Decades Behind Bars

After nine execution dates, three last meals and a Supreme Court ruling in his favor, Richard Glossip should soon walk free.

Three decades after he was arrested for a capital crime he swore he didn’t commit – and more than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction – former death row prisoner Richard Glossip has been granted bond by an Oklahoma judge, setting the stage for him to walk free.

In an order handed down on Thursday, Oklahoma County District Judge Natalie Mai set Glossip’s 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.  

“We are extremely grateful that Judge Natalie Mai has granted Richard Glossip a bond,” Glossip’s longtime attorney Don Knight wrote in a statement. “In doing so, she rejected the State’s 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.”

Mai’s decision comes more than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Glossip’s conviction 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’s decades-long ordeal.

In Shocking Move, Oklahoma AG Decides to Retry Richard Glossip for Murder

But in June 2025, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who is running for governor, announced that he would retry Glossip for first degree murder, opening a new chapter in the protracted legal saga. Glossip has remained in jail ever since.

It’s unclear when Glosip will be released.

Glossip was twice 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’s account became the basis for the state’s case against Glossip – and for a plea deal that allowed Sneed to avoid the death penalty. Sneed is serving a life sentence.

Prosecutors told jurors at Glossip’s 1998 trial 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,” they 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. 

Glossip’s conviction was overturned twice. In 2001, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that........

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