OKLAHOMA CITY — Richard Glossip was released from custody in Oklahoma City on May 19, 2026, after the U.S. Supreme Court vacated his murder conviction and a judge set his bond at $500,000. Kim Kardashian provided the bail money that enabled his release.

Glossip had been incarcerated for nearly three decades after his 1997 arrest for the murder of Barry Van Treese, owner of the Best Budget Inn near Oklahoma City. He was twice convicted and sentenced to death, first in 1998 and again in 2004 after the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals overturned his initial conviction in 2001 due to ineffective legal representation. Glossip always maintained his innocence.

In February 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated Glossip’s conviction, finding that key witness Justin Sneed lied during the retrial and that prosecutors failed to correct his false testimony. The Court also cited “additional conduct by the prosecutor further undermines confidence in the verdict.” Sneed, a 19-year-old handyman at the time of the crime, had admitted to beating Van Treese to death with a baseball bat and claimed Glossip pressured him into the killing; he received a life sentence in exchange for his testimony.

After the Supreme Court ruling, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond—who had previously blocked Glossip’s execution and appealed his conviction to the high court—announced plans to retry him for first-degree murder. Drummond’s office argued that Glossip should remain jailed pending retrial but acknowledged it had no new evidence of his guilt. A judge initially denied bond in July 2025, but later recused herself after it emerged she had close ties to the original prosecuting office. On May 14, 2026, Oklahoma County Judge Natalie Mai set bond at $500,000.

Upon his release, Glossip walked out of the jail just after 5 p.m., captured by a local ABC affiliate’s live feed. “It’s overwhelming but it’s amazing at the same time,” he said before getting into his wife Lea’s SUV. The couple married in March 2022 after corresponding since she watched the 2017 documentary “Killing Richard Glossip”; Lea is an attorney who was in law school during their early correspondence.

Glossip described adjusting to life outside prison as disorienting. He nearly fell on a carpeted courtroom floor in June 2025, saying, “You’re not balanced for that. You’re balanced for walking on very hard floors. It’s just really weird to, like, walk on carpet and stuff again.” He also noted difficulty with everyday routines: “I keep waiting for the water to go off. I’ve even walked out of that bathroom and the water was still going, and I keep forgetting I have to turn it off.” On his first night out, he barely slept due to the silence, a stark contrast to constant jail noise. “Once you’re out here and you see all the things that was taken away from you—and all the times they almost took everything away from me, my life and everything—you see all of it now. And it kind of still makes me angry at times because none of this should have ever happened. And this should have never been taken from me in the first place.”