(Richard) Glossip won the victory of a lifetime last February, when the U.S. Supreme Court vacated his conviction, finding that it was rooted in false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. After almost three decades facing execution for a crime he swore he didn’t commit, Glossip hoped the ruling would mark the end of his ordeal.
But nearly a year later, he was stuck in the county jail with no end in sight. Rather than resolve the case as Glossip’s advocates expected him to do, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who is running for governor, announced that he planned to retry Glossip for first-degree murder — and asked a judge to reject his request for bond in the meantime. Although defense lawyers pointed out that their 62-year-old client was not a flight risk and posed no danger to society, prosecutors convinced Oklahoma County District Court Judge Heather Coyle to keep Glossip at the jail — a notoriously overcrowded and filthy facility known as one of the deadliest in the country.
In the months since, the state has been unable to get its prosecution off the ground. Glossip’s legal team has successfully sought the recusal of every criminal court judge assigned to the case — all of them former prosecutors who once worked for the Oklahoma County District Attorney, the same office that sent Glossip to death row. While the attorney general’s office has accused Glossip’s lawyers of “judge shopping,” an October evidentiary hearing showed the defense attorneys’ concerns over the judges’ impartiality to be well-founded. One judge assigned to the trial, who had originally refused to step down, was revealed to have taken multiple vacations with the original prosecutor in Glossip’s case.