Former Oklahoma death row prisoner Richard Glossip, who spent nearly three decades behind bars and came within moments of execution three times over a 1997 killing, pleaded guilty Thursday to a lesser accessory charge, his attorney said.
Glossip had been sentenced to death for the killing of Barry Van Treese, the owner of the Oklahoma City motel where Glossip once worked. Van Treese was beaten to death with a baseball bat in a case prosecutors described as a murder-for-hire plot.
Justin Sneed, another motel employee, admitted that he robbed and killed Van Treese. But Sneed testified that he carried out the killing after Glossip promised to pay him $10,000. Sneed became the prosecution’s central witness against Glossip and received a life sentence.
In February 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out Glossip’s conviction. He was released on bond in May to await retrial. His longstanding claims of innocence have attracted support from Kim Kardashian and other prominent figures.
Under Glossip’s plea to the lesser accessory charge, prosecutors dismissed the murder case, said Don Knight, his attorney. Glossip is scheduled to be sentenced in December and could either be released or returned to prison for as many as 15 more years.
“We believe Rich has more than paid his debt to society by spending nearly 30 years on death row, during which time he was served three last meals and came within minutes of being executed for a crime he did not commit,” Knight said.
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond had previously said the state would retry Glossip on a murder charge but would not seek the death penalty. In a statement distributed to media outlets, Drummond said prosecutors would pursue additional prison time instead.
Drummond had earlier supported Glossip’s effort to overturn his conviction and obtain a new trial, citing errors made during the original proceedings.
Accepting the lesser plea “was a difficult decision for me and, more importantly, the Van Treese family. We both recognize that this path ensures a conviction related to Mr. Van Treese’s killing and gives us the best chance to secure additional prison time for Glossip,” Drummond said.
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By pleading guilty to being an accessory, Glossip acknowledged the prosecution’s claims that he helped cover a broken motel window with plexiglass, saw Van Treese’s body and failed to tell police that Sneed had killed him, Knight said.
“He had nothing to do with the murder, none of the planning, or carrying it out,” Knight said.
A jury first convicted Glossip of murder in 1998. An appeals court overturned that conviction in 2001, finding that he had received ineffective assistance from his attorney. Glossip was tried again in 2004, convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
During his years on death row, Oklahoma courts scheduled Glossip’s execution nine times. He came so close to being put to death that he ate three separate last meals. In 2015, he was held in a cell next to Oklahoma’s execution chamber while awaiting lethal injection.
His scheduled execution time passed, however. Inside the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, officials were scrambling after discovering that one of the lethal drugs supplied for the procedure did not match the state’s execution protocol. The medication error led to a moratorium on executions in Oklahoma that lasted nearly seven years.
Van Treese’s family had urged the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold Glossip’s conviction and death sentence.
In its 5-3 ruling in 2025, the Supreme Court overturned Glossip’s conviction and death sentence. The justices found that prosecutors had failed to correct key witness Sneed’s testimony during Glossip’s second trial, violating Glossip’s right to due process and entitling him to a new trial.
“Turning to the merits, we conclude that the prosecution violated its constitutional obligation to correct false testimony,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the majority opinion.
Glossip’s case drew international attention after actress Susan Sarandon took up his cause. Sarandon won an Academy Award for portraying Sister Helen Prejean, a death penalty opponent who fought to save a man on Louisiana’s death row in the 1995 film “Dead Man Walking.” Glossip’s case was also examined in the 2017 documentary “Killing Richard Glossip.”
