OKLAHOMA — An Oklahoma judge ruled that Richard Glossip may be released on bond while awaiting retrial on a murder charge tied to a 1997 killing. Judge Natalie Mai set the bond at $500,000, requiring Glossip to post 10%, or $50,000, to secure his release.

The bond order requires Glossip to wear an electronic monitoring device, prohibits him from traveling outside Oklahoma, bars him from contacting any witnesses in the case and forbids him from consuming any drugs or alcohol. His attorney, Donald Knight, said the bond posting process could take two to three days.

"The court fully expects that the state will rigorously prosecute its case going forward and the defense will provide robust representation for Glossip," Mai said. She added that the court "hopes that a new trial, free of error, will provide all interested parties and the citizens of Oklahoma the closure they deserve."

Knight said that "Mr. Glossip has many supporters and we are hopeful those supporters can afford the bail." Knight also said in a statement that "Mr. Glossip now has the chance to taste freedom while his defense team continues to pursue justice on his behalf against a system that the United States Supreme Court has found to be guilty of serious misconduct by state prosecutors."

Prosecutors allege Glossip hired someone to kill his former boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese, in Oklahoma City in 1997. Court filings show that Van Treese died after being bludgeoned with a baseball bat, and that a co-defendant confessed to physically carrying out the killing but claimed Glossip paid him to do it. The co-defendant received a lifetime prison sentence and served as a key witness for the prosecution during Glossip's capital murder trial.

Glossip was convicted twice of capital murder and has maintained his innocence. In 2022, the state of Oklahoma found evidence that the co-defendant may have had a mental illness known to prosecutors that was not disclosed during trial. A February 2025 court order granted Glossip a new trial on the basis that the prosecution's failure to correct the witness's testimony violated his constitutional right to due process. The U.S. Supreme Court later threw out his conviction, ruling that allowing the witness to give false testimony violated his right to a fair trial.

In June 2025, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said the state intended to retry Glossip for Van Treese's death and planned to seek a sentence of life imprisonment rather than the death penalty. The announcement followed the Supreme Court ruling that vacated Glossip's conviction.

During his time on death row, Oklahoma courts set nine different execution dates for Glossip, and he ate three separate last meals. In 2015, he was held in a cell next to Oklahoma's execution chamber awaiting execution by lethal injection when prison officials discovered that one of the lethal drugs they had received did not match execution protocols. The drug mix-up led to a nearly seven-year moratorium on executions in the state.