\n<\/p>\n
When the elevator<\/span> doors opened, the reporters waiting in the hallway immediately crowded around the gaunt, orange-clad man who emerged, escorted by his public defender and a sheriff\u2019s deputy. The three men made their way toward the seventh-floor courtroom of Oklahoma County District Court Judge Natalie Mai, as reporters shouted questions.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy did you kill Barry Van Treese?\u201d one asked.<\/p>\n Justin Sneed, 49, didn\u2019t answer, his handcuffs and waist chain clanging as he walked. With a short, graying goatee and long brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, Sneed maintained a hollow stare. Inside the courtroom, his lawyer directed him to a chair just in front of the jury box. Sneed sat, his hands clasped in front of him, and kept his gaze toward the floor. Directly across the room was Richard Glossip, the man nearly executed for killing their boss \u2013 a grisly murder that Sneed actually committed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sneed was 19 years old when he beat Van Treese to death at the Best Budget Inn, a rundown motel Van Treese owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. Sneed admitted to the January 1997 murder but swore Glossip put him up to it. Glossip insisted he was innocent and, apart from Sneed\u2019s account, there was scant evidence connecting him to the crime. Still, in exchange for a life sentence, Sneed became the state\u2019s star witness against Glossip, clinching his conviction and sending him to death row.<\/p>\n It would not take long for Sneed\u2019s story to start falling apart. Glossip\u2019s original conviction was overturned after a state court found that Glossip\u2019s trial lawyers failed to present critical exculpatory evidence \u2013 a video of Sneed\u2019s police interrogation that showed Oklahoma City detectives pressuring him into implicating Glossip. Nevertheless, in 2004, a second jury reconvicted Glossip and again sentenced him to death.<\/p>\n In 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated Glossip\u2019s conviction<\/a>, concluding that it was rooted in false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. The justices found that Sneed lied on the stand, dismantling the basis for the state\u2019s case. \u201cBesides Sneed, no other witness and no physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese\u2019s murder,\u201d Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote<\/a> for the majority. \u201cThus, the jury could convict Glossip only if it believed Sneed.\u201d<\/p>\n Many expected Glossip\u2019s saga to end there. Instead, Oklahoma announced<\/a> it would retry Glossip for first-degree murder, once again relying on Sneed. \u201cThe evidence presented will be essentially the same as was presented in the first two trials,\u201d prosecutor Jimmy Harmon told Mai<\/a> earlier this year.<\/p>\n Glossip\u2019s attorneys have strenuously objected to the state\u2019s plan to use the same discredited evidence for a third time. They are also adamant that they should have a chance to put Sneed on the witness stand, so that Mai can assess his credibility before trial. It is this insistence that led Glossip and Sneed to sit face to face in court for the first time in decades.<\/p>\n Glossip, now 63, was released on bond<\/a> in May. He sat at the defense table in a navy suit and crisp white shirt while the daylong hearing got underway. Mai had convened the September 30 proceeding to consider a flurry of defense motions, many of which centered on Sneed\u2019s role in the case. Sneed had been subpoenaed in advance of the hearing, which attracted a gaggle of reporters to Mai\u2019s courtroom. But it was unclear whether he would take the stand.<\/p>\n Much of the time was spent listening to lawyers on both sides argue over ongoing conflicts in the case. Glossip\u2019s legal team has repeatedly clashed with prosecutors over the state\u2019s obligation to disclose evidence before trial. The constant disagreements have threatened to derail Mai\u2019s tight trial schedule; after initially setting Glossip\u2019s trial for September, she has since pushed the trial date to December 7.<\/p>\n But that too seems vanishingly unlikely. As the hearing dragged on, the bigger question was whether a trial will happen at all.<\/p>\n It was exactly<\/span> 11 years earlier, on September 30, 2015, that Glossip came perilously close<\/a> to being put to death at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, only for officials to realize at the eleventh hour that they had procured the wrong combination of drugs to carry out his lethal injection. In the decade that followed, Glossip\u2019s defense attorney, Don Knight, reinvestigated the case and uncovered a trove of evidence previously withheld by the state. He also secured a host of new witnesses<\/a> who came forward to say that, despite the state\u2019s portrayal of Sneed as a hapless dolt who was entirely under Glossip\u2019s control, Sneed was actually cunning, volatile, and entirely capable of murder on his own.<\/p>\n The revelations eventually prompted a bipartisan group of Oklahoma lawmakers to question Glossip\u2019s conviction and seek an independent investigation into the case. In June 2022, the law firm Reed Smith LLP published<\/a> the first in a series of exhaustive reports, unearthing even more evidence undermining prosecutors\u2019 theory of the crime and revealing that the state had willfully destroyed<\/a> key pieces of evidence before Glossip\u2019s 2004 retrial. The following year, newly elected state Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced<\/a> his own probe into the case. That investigation<\/a> found myriad problems with Glossip\u2019s prosecution, persuading Drummond that Glossip\u2019s conviction and death sentence should not stand.<\/p>\n Drummond asked<\/a> the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to vacate Glossip\u2019s conviction but it refused<\/a>, once again setting Glossip up for execution. The attorney general took unprecedented steps<\/a> to spare Glossip\u2019s life, ultimately joining Glossip\u2019s efforts to get the case before the Supreme Court \u2013 and taking a victory lap<\/a> after the justices finally ruled in Glossip\u2019s favor in February 2025.<\/p>\n But just a few months after the high court ruling, Drummond did an abrupt about-face, announcing that he would retry<\/a> Glossip for first-degree murder. The reversal coincided with Drummond\u2019s campaign for governor, which ended in a primary defeat this past August. In the meantime, defense attorneys repeatedly reiterated Drummond\u2019s own critiques of the case, emphasizing that, until recently, he vehemently criticized the same evidence his prosecutors plan to reuse.<\/p>\n Among these criticisms were key concessions Drummond made regarding misconduct by Connie Smothermon, the lead prosecutor at Glossip\u2019s 2004 retrial. At the heart of the Supreme Court ruling was that Smothermon not only failed to disclose key notes about Sneed\u2019s psychiatric history, but also failed to correct portions of Sneed\u2019s testimony that she knew were false.<\/p>\n Drummond also conceded that Smothermon improperly sought to alter Sneed\u2019s testimony before he took the stand at the retrial to make it fit the forensic evidence. At Glossip\u2019s first trial, Sneed denied attacking Van Treese with a knife even though a knife was found at the scene \u2013 and despite the medical examiner\u2019s findings that there were puncture wounds on Van Treese\u2019s chest. Midway through Glossip\u2019s second trial, Smothermon wrote a note to Sneed\u2019s defense attorney, indicating that there were inconsistencies Sneed needed to clear up.<\/p>\n \u201cOur biggest problem,\u201d Smothermon wrote, \u201cis still the knife.\u201d When Sneed later took the stand, he testified that he did, in fact, stab Van Treese.<\/p>\n Glossip\u2019s attorneys did not discover this note until 2022. In its ruling, the Supreme Court agreed with Drummond that Smothermon violated Glossip\u2019s rights by trying to modify Sneed\u2019s testimony midtrial. Yet Drummond\u2019s own prosecutors now argue that there\u2019s no evidence that Smothermon\u2019s midtrial intervention \u201cimproperly influenced\u201d Sneed\u2019s testimony.<\/p>\n In early September, Glossip\u2019s attorneys filed a motion urging Mai to put Sneed on the stand to clear this up. \u201cNo court has yet held an evidentiary hearing to determine the full scope of the\u2026violation,\u201d they wrote, \u201cits effect on Sneed\u2019s testimony, and what procedures may be necessary to prevent the jury from being deceived about what Sneed remembers versus what he was coached to say.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDo I have the choice of re-canting my testimony at any time during my life, or anything like that.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n In a surprisingly candid reply, Joshua Lockett, deputy chief of the Oklahoma attorney general\u2019s criminal appeals unit, wrote that it is unreasonable to expect Sneed to be able to answer questions about the knife and his shifting trial testimony after all these years. \u201cAny evidentiary hearing would be unable to disentangle the source of Sneed\u2019s knowledge\u201d \u2013 whether it came from Sneed\u2019s memory about the night of the crime, or from what he \u201cabsorbed\u201d from Smothermon\u2019s midtrial note, he wrote. \u201cThat sorting would have been difficult in 2004,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt is impossible in 2026.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, the state appeared to be conceding that its star witness cannot now reliably recount what happened the night he murdered Barry Van Treese.<\/p>\n Hanging over Wednesday\u2019s<\/span> proceeding was an uncomfortable reality that has dogged the state\u2019s case for years: Evidence that Sneed has repeatedly tried to take back his claim that Glossip coerced him into murdering Van Treese.<\/p>\n In October 2014, nearly a year before Glossip\u2019s near-execution, Sneed\u2019s adult daughter O\u2019Ryan Justine Sneed sent a letter to the Oklahoma Board of Pardon and Parole, urging them to grant clemency to Glossip. \u201cFor a couple of years now, my father has been talking to me about recanting his original testimony,\u201d she wrote<\/a>. \u201cI feel his conscious [sic] is getting to him.\u201d<\/p>\n Among the most compelling pieces of evidence to emerge since then are two handwritten notes, penned years apart, in which Sneed indicated he wanted to retract his testimony. In 2003, a year before Glossip\u2019s second trial, Sneed wrote to his public defender, Gina Walker, asking, \u201cDo I have the choice of re-canting my testimony at any time during my life, or anything like that.\u201d In 2007, he sent Walker another letter: \u201cThere are a lot of things right now that are eating at me,\u201d he wrote<\/a>. Things he needed \u201cto clean up.\u201d Walker, who has since died, discouraged him from coming forward.<\/p>\n\n