Former Oklahoma death row prisoner Richard Glossip, who spent nearly 30 years incarcerated and was on the brink of execution three times for a 1997 murder, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, his attorney said Thursday.
Glossip had been sentenced to death over the killing in Oklahoma City of his former boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese. Van Treese was beaten with a baseball bat in what prosecutors have alleged was a murder-for-hire scheme.
Another man,
Justin Sneed, admitted robbing and killing Van Treese, but testified that he did so after Glossip promised to pay him $10,000. Sneed was the state’s key witness against Glossip and was sentenced to life in prison.
The U.S. Supreme Court previously threw out Glossip’s conviction, and he was released on bond in May to await retrial. His longstanding claims of innocence have drawn support from Kim Kardashian and other prominent figures.
With Glossip's plea to a lesser accessory charge, the murder charge was dismissed, said Don Knight, Glossip’s attorney. He said Glossip will be sentenced in December, when he could be released or sent back to prison for another 15 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 seek to retry Glossip on a murder charge but would not pursue the death penalty again. In a statement sent to media outlets, Drummond said prosecutors would seek more prison time.
Accepting the plea to a lesser charge “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 murder and gives us the best chance to secure additional prison time for Glossip,” Drummond said.
By pleading guilty to being an accessory, Knight said Glossip acknowledged the prosecution's allegations that he helped place plexiglass over a broken window at the hotel and saw Van Treese's body, and that he did not tell police Sneed had killed him.
“He had nothing to do with the murder, none of the planning, or carrying it out,” Knight said.
During his time on death row, courts in Oklahoma set nine different execution dates for Glossip, and he came so close to being put to death that he ate three separate last meals. In 2015, he was even held in a cell next to Oklahoma’s execution chamber, waiting to be strapped to a gurney and die by lethal injection.
But the scheduled time for his execution came and went. Behind the walls of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, prison officials were scrambling after learning one of the lethal drugs they received to carry out the procedure didn’t match the execution protocols. The drug mix-up ultimately led to a nearly seven-year moratorium on executions in Oklahoma.
Van Treese’s family had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to leave Glossip’s conviction and sentence intact.
Glossip’s case attracted international attention after actress Susan Sarandon — who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of death penalty opponent Sister Helen Prejean’s fight to save a man on Louisiana’s death row in the 1995 movie “Dead Man Walking” — took up his cause in real life. Glossip’s case was also featured in the 2017 documentary film titled “Killing Richard Glossip.”
