OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma on Thursday, November 12, dismissed the first-degree murder charge against Richard Glossip, the former death row prisoner who faced nine execution dates over nearly three decades, after he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of accessory after the fact to first-degree murder in the 1997 killing of his boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese.
Source: NBC News
Glossip, 63, entered the plea on Thursday morning in Oklahoma City. His longtime attorney, Don Knight, said Glossip pleaded guilty to the accessory charge in order to “put this matter to rest,” while continuing to maintain his innocence of the murder itself. “For 30 years Richard Glossip has maintained his innocence,” Knight said in a statement released after the hearing. “After nearly executing him nine times, the State of Oklahoma has now dismissed the murder charge against him.”
Source: Death Penalty Information Center
What the plea changes — and what it does not
The plea cancels the retrial that had been set to begin on December 7. In its place, the court will hold a sentencing hearing on December 17 and 18 on the accessory charge alone. There is no agreed sentence: prosecutors intend to seek the maximum 45-year sentence, according to Attorney General Gentner Drummond's office, while the defence is expected to argue that Glossip has already served nearly 30 years in prison and should not go back.
The 45-year maximum comes from the Oklahoma law in force at the time of the 1997 killing, which governs the accessory offence in this case. The final decision on the sentence rests with the court at the December hearing.
Murder charge: dismissed Nov. 12, 2026. Plea: guilty to accessory after the fact to first-degree murder. Retrial set for Dec. 7: cancelled. Next step: sentencing, Dec. 17–18, with a maximum of 45 years under the law as it stood in 1997.
A killing at an Oklahoma City motel in 1997
Barry Van Treese owned the Oklahoma City motel where Glossip worked. He was beaten to death with a baseball bat in 1997. Justin Sneed, a coworker of Glossip's, confessed to carrying out the killing but testified at trial that Glossip had paid him to do it and had helped cover it up afterwards — the account on which the case against Glossip was built.
Glossip was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. Over the years that followed he was scheduled for execution nine times, in one of the longest and most closely watched death row cases in the United States.
The Supreme Court threw out the conviction
On February 25, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5–3 decision in Glossip v. Oklahoma, threw out Glossip's 2004 conviction and ordered a new trial. The court found that prosecutors had allowed a key witness — Sneed — to lie in court and had withheld crucial information about that same witness, violating Glossip's right to a fair trial.
Oklahoma's own attorney general had already broken with the original prosecution. In 2023, Attorney General Gentner Drummond acknowledged that the evidence, in the words later quoted in court, “does not support that he is guilty of first degree murder beyond a reasonable doubt.” On June 9, 2025, Drummond announced that his office would retry Glossip on a first-degree murder charge but would not seek the death penalty.
In May 2026, Glossip was released on $500,000 bail and has been living outside prison since then. Knight said on Thursday that Glossip has “been living a peaceful and law-abiding life” since his release — a point the defence is expected to press at sentencing.
Why this case drew national attention
Few American death penalty cases have run as long, or come as close to an execution as often, as this one. For supporters of Glossip, Thursday's dismissal closes the argument they had made for years: that the state should never have sought to execute a man on the word of the confessed killer whose testimony its own Supreme Court case found had been presented falsely. For prosecutors, the accessory plea still holds Glossip criminally responsible for his part after the killing, which is why Drummond's office says it will ask the court for the maximum sentence in December. Both of those positions now land in front of a sentencing judge, not a jury.
What happens next
Sentencing is set for December 17 and 18, 2026. The court will decide where in the range — up to the 45-year maximum — Glossip's sentence falls, and how the nearly three decades he has already spent in custody are counted. The first-degree murder charge itself is dismissed, the December 7 retrial is off, and the death penalty is no longer part of this case in any form. Whatever the court decides in December will decide whether a man who was released in May, after nine execution dates, returns to prison or stays free.