A Supreme Court Win Didn’t Free Richard Glossip. But This Judge Could.

Oklahoma prosecutor Jimmy Harmon was making his usual points about why Richard Glossip belongs behind bars when he trotted out a not-so-casual dig at his opposing counsel.

It was mid-February in Oklahoma City, and one of Glossip’s lawyers had just explained the main reason why his client should be released on bond. Under Oklahoma law, defendants like Glossip are entitled to bail unless there is a firm basis to believe they are guilty. The evidence against Glossip had never been strong — and the U.S. Supreme Court demolished the state’s case when it vacated Glossip’s conviction over false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. Under the Supreme Court’s ruling, the attorneys argued, there was no justification for keeping him in jail.

Harmon responded with scorn. “The defendant’s argument reminds me of a Bruce Springsteen song,” he said. “It’s called ‘Glory Days.’”

“The gist of that song is that glory days will pass you by,” he went on. Glossip’s attorneys were clinging to their cherished Supreme Court victory because, after years of losing in court, “they finally won one,” he said. “And they want to wave that Supreme Court opinion around.”

In other words, Glossip’s lawyers were like Springsteen’s former high school baseball star — still talking about his winning fastball at a roadside bar.

In the quiet courtroom, Harmon’s zinger landed with a thud. The comparison was clumsy and ill-fitting; a Supreme Court victory is anything but fleeting. Lawyers and courts are bound by Supreme Court decisions — invoking its rulings is sort of the point.

Glossip, meanwhile, sat at the defense table in his orange prison garb over a thermal shirt. Oklahoma County District Court Judge Natalie Mai — the seventh judge assigned to his case since the high court sent it back to Oklahoma — had allowed him to be unshackled for the hearing. Just a few days earlier, Glossip had turned 63, his 29th birthday behind bars. He knew more than most people about time you can never get back.

Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to die for the 1997 murder of his boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese, who was brutally killed at the Best Budget Inn on the outskirts of town. A 19-year-old handyman named Justin Sneed admitted to fatally beating Van Treese but insisted that Glossip pushed him to do 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.

But the case began unraveling soon after Glossip arrived on death row. Footage 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. In the decades that followed, Glossip’s attorneys discovered that prosecutors hid and destroyed evidence in the case — and that Sneed had attempted to recant his testimony multiple times.

The case ultimately ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Glossip’s favor on February 25, 2025. The justices found that Sneed lied on the stand, that prosecutors had failed to correct his testimony, and that additional evidence of prosecutorial misconduct “further undermines confidence in the verdict.”

Yet one year later, the case is far from over. Rather than release Glossip, as advocates expected him to do, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder — and asked a judge to keep him in jail awaiting trial. An Oklahoma County judge granted the request and refused to release Glossip on bond, only to later step down from the case after admitting that she was close friends with the lead prosecutor at his second trial. A revolving door of recusals followed, with five more criminal court judges leaving the case due to their own ties to the district attorney’s office that sent Glossip to death row.

Mai, a civil judge, was assigned to the case in December. It was now up to her to reconsider whether Glossip should be released from jail. Standing before her, defense attorney Corbin Brewster urged Mai to consider the Supreme Court’s decision before weighing the other factors that judges use to make bond decisions — whether a defendant is a flight risk, for example, or a danger to the community. The “threshold question” before the court, he said, was whether prosecutors could show by clear and convincing evidence that Glossip should be presumed guilty of murder. The answer was clearly no. If Mai agreed, she could rule from the bench and free Glossip that day.

But Mai wasn’t ready to do that. She told Brewer that she had reserved the whole day for the hearing and would issue an order after considering all the evidence. “I would like to get all the information today, so that way I can make a written finding in an expedient manner,” she said.

After three decades insisting on his innocence, Glossip would have to wait a little bit longer.

The 2025 ruling in Glossip v. Oklahoma was momentous: an astonishing victory for a man who had stared down nine execution dates and lived. For Glossip’s longtime attorney, Don Knight, the ruling should have marked the end of a protracted legal battle that had made his client the most famous death row prisoner in the country — and which had won the support of the Oklahoma attorney general himself.

Drummond, who entered the attorney general’s office in 2023, once took unprecedented steps to stop Oklahoma from killing Glossip. After commissioning an independent investigation into his case, he asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn Glossip’s conviction. When the court refused, setting Glossip up for execution, Drummond personally testified before the state’s pardon and parole board, urging them to spare Glossip’s life.

But things changed in the months following the Supreme Court’s decision. After initially basking in the justices’ ruling, Drummond vanished as the public face of the case. In June, he shocked Glossip’s longtime supporters — including conservative allies of the Republican attorney general — by announcing he would retry Glossip.

The most obvious explanation was politics: Drummond’s decision coincided with his run for governor — and his previous interventions in Glossip’s case had infuriated members of Oklahoma’s conservative legal establishment. In the months after the ruling, Drummond lurched noticeably to the right, going out of his way to align himself with the Trump administration’s political agenda. In the meantime, he left it to one of his deputies, Harmon, to retry Glossip’s case.

Harmon has since downplayed the significance of the Supreme Court ruling while peddling a warmed-over version of the state’s discredited case. The lack of new evidence was striking at Glossip’s first bond hearing, when he introduced exhibits designed to cast Glossip in a sinister light — but which fell far short of proving he was capable of murder. He presented affidavits from Glossip’s ex-wife and another woman who had previously provided him with financial support, both of whom wrote that they later felt used and manipulated. Harmon also played a recording of a phone call between Glossip and a third woman, in which Glossip expressed estrangement from his family — an attempt to show that he had no deep ties to Oklahoma.

At the time, Oklahoma County Criminal Court Judge Heather Coyle seemed somewhat skeptical of the evidence. She reminded Harmon that she needed “clear and convincing evidence” that Glossip was likely to be found guilty at a third trial, asking him to “please expand on the facts that support that.” Harmon directed her to the transcripts from Glossip’s previous trials, which ultimately proved persuasive enough.

There was little guarantee that the same approach would prove convincing to Mai. Yet Harmon mostly repeated his prior presentation, resubmitting the affidavits and phone recording, along with the transcripts from Glossip’s two trials. “We have a plethora of evidence,” he told Mai, only to acknowledge that there was nothing new. “The evidence presented will be essentially the same as was presented in the first two trials,” he said.

Harmon also insisted that Glossip posed a danger to the community. “He’s not as young as spry as he was,” he said. But “Mr. Glossip’s manipulative behavior is dangerous in and of itself.”

Glossip’s attorneys, too, repeated arguments from the prior hearing. But there was one major development that had unfolded since then. In July 2025, while the decision to grant bond was pending before Coyle, Glossip’s lawyers revealed a secret deal between Knight and Drummond dating back to 2023. The attorney general had agreed to let Glossip plead to a lesser charge and then walk free. Although the deal was based on the erroneous assumption that the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals would grant Drummond’s request to vacate Glossip’s conviction, it remained current well after the Supreme Court’s decision, according to a lengthy affidavit filed by Knight last summer.

Lawyers for Glossip asked the court to enforce the agreement — an issue that is being litigated separately. At the bond hearing, Brewster invoked the deal to remind Mai that Drummond himself clearly did not buy Harmon’s portrayal of Glossip as a “killer.” If he did, he would never have agreed to a deal that allowed for Glossip’s immediate release.

At the end of the hearing, Mai told the lawyers she needed time to review the full record, which she had yet to receive from the state. She also requested a last round of briefs from both sides. “If you can get that to me in about 30 days, and give me another 15 to 30 days to work with it, I promise I will try to get it out as soon as possible,” she said. “But the reality is my docket is just so full right now, and so I’ll work on it to the extent that I can.”

Shortly afterward, Glossip was placed back in shackles and escorted out of the courtroom. Sheriff’s deputies took him down the elevator to await transfer back to the county jail. Speaking to reporters, Knight reiterated that Drummond should honor their previous agreement to release Glossip — and if he refuses, the court should make him do it.

Knight expressed some hope that, by taking the time to study the record, Mai might see the case for the travesty it is — and give his client a long-overdue taste of freedom. Nobody should have to spend so much time waiting for their first fair trial. “This is wrong,” he said. “It’s been wrong for 30 years.”

Jordan Smith contributed to this report.