The Free Press
Lea Glossip has been waiting nine years for this moment.
The anti–death penalty activist struck up a pen pal friendship with death row inmate Richard Glossip in 2016. Six years later they married, when he was 59 and she was 32.
She always believed that Glossip—who was convicted of murdering his boss in 1998 at the motel in Oklahoma City where he worked—was innocent. So did many others. As I reported one year ago, Republican politicians in the very red state of Oklahoma have been campaigning alongside anti–death penalty advocates for Glossip’s exoneration for years.
He had been scheduled to die nine times and had eaten his last meal three times when his case finally went to the Supreme Court last October. It was his last chance for a reprieve.
Finally, on Tuesday, the nation’s highest court ruled that Richard Glossip deserves a new trial. And if the Oklahoma County district attorney believes there is not enough evidence to convict Glossip for murder again, a trial will not be called—and Glossip will finally walk free.
When Lea Glossip texted me today, she was exuberant over the news: “We’re both just extremely overcome with so many emotions, and yes, lots of happy tears!! We’re both just extremely blessed and grateful to be sharing this moment together and hopeful for what’s ahead.”
In the meantime, Glossip will be moved from death row at the state penitentiary in McAlester as soon as this week and placed at Oklahoma County Jail, according to Kevin McDugle, a former Republican state representative from Oklahoma who has been pushing for his release.
McDugle told me that, despite being a proponent of the death penalty, he is “1,000 percent ecstatic” about the court’s ruling. Glossip’s case was unique in that his lawyers teamed up with state representatives like McDugle to urge the high court to overturn his conviction and death sentence. “This is truly a miracle, because no one individual could have ever made this happen,” he told me. “It took so many different people to make this happen.”
The 5–3 Supreme Court decision supported what Glossip and his defenders had long argued—that prosecutors based their case against him on unreliable testimony from the man who was actually guilty of the crime.
The ruling—which was backed by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who Donald Trump nominated to the court during his first term as president—also exposes a widening gap between the president and Republicans who have grown leery of capital punishment.
One of those Republicans is state representative J.J. Humphrey, who told me he wants a “moratorium on capital punishment until we get our problems solved” in Oklahoma—where there are now 31 inmates on death row.
“I am an extreme Trump supporter, but that doesn’t make him God,” Humphrey said of the president, who issued an executive order on his first day back in office to reinstate the federal death penalty after President Joe Biden had suspended it.
Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, agreed with that. “President Trump and the administration are going to have to come to terms with the growing sentiment among Republicans in red states that there’s a serious problem with the institution of the death penalty. That’s something that the Trump administration can’t ignore, as they continue to consider criminal justice reform.”
Glossip, 62, was convicted of killing Barry Van Treese, the owner of the Best Budget Inn, in Oklahoma in 1997. Glossip had been the motel’s general manager. Justin Sneed, a handyman with a drug problem who Glossip had hired to do odd jobs around the motel, was found guilty of murdering Van Treese.
But Sneed, with the urging of Oklahoma detectives, testified that it was Glossip who had planned the murder. Despite any evidence connecting him to the murder, Glossip was convicted and sentenced to death. And even though Sneed later acknowledged that he felt guilty about implicating his coworker in the crime, Glossip’s calls for clemency were repeatedly denied.
In 2023, I spoke with Glossip on the phone from Lea’s apartment in Oklahoma City. At the time, he recalled coming within hours of being executed, in September 2015. He was in his cell, next to the room where they were about to kill him via lethal injection, when he heard other prisoners on death row banging on their doors.
“It’s a send-off—letting them know people are thinking about them,” he told me back then.
His life was spared at the last minute when the Republican governor stepped in and stopped the execution—after they realized the state didn’t have the right drugs to carry it out.
Demetrius Minor—the head of Conservatives Concerned, an anti–death penalty group in Tampa, Florida—predicted the Glossip ruling would have nationwide ripple effects.
“The system is error-prone,” Minor told me. “This is going to warrant the concern of conservatives, not just in Oklahoma, but also nationwide.
“They’re going to see this as the government is too intrusive, too big, inept, and that we cannot trust the government to administer the only punishment that is irreversible, which is capital punishment,” he added.
Even though most people in Oklahoma still back the death penalty, there’s been some pushback in part due to what’s happened to Glossip, with some prominent conservatives calling for criminal justice reform. One recent poll even shows that when given the choice between life in prison without parole and the death penalty, voters in the state are pretty much split down the middle.
Farley said he thinks Glossip’s case has given many Republicans who are secretly opposed to capital punishment a reason to push against it—by pointing to the flaws in the system. “If you’re a conservative who is pro-life, how can you be pro–capital punishment, especially of someone who has been innocently convicted?” he added.
When I asked Lea—who visits her husband every Friday at the state penitentiary in McAlester a little over two hours away from her place—how she and her husband planned to celebrate the ruling, she texted back: “Just by spending the time together.”
I asked if they would be permitted to have a meal together, and she replied: “The only food we can have is what’s sold in the prison vending machines, but we will find something to share out of there to celebrate with!”
