Richard Glossip had two hours left to live.

In 1998, the Oklahoma death row inmate was sentenced to die after being convicted as the mastermind behind a murder he didn’t commit.

The admitted killer—a teenage maintenance worker named Justin Sneed with a history of violent behavior and drug use—murdered the owner of the motel where he and Glossip both worked in 1997. Sneed told authorities Glossip asked him to do it. In exchange for his testimony, Sneed was given a life sentence—and Glossip was slated for execution.

Details of the story Sneed shared with investigators have wavered over the years and no physical or DNA evidence was ever discovered linking Glossip to the crime. However, Glossip’s overworked and underfunded public defenders were no match for one of the most deadly prosecution offices in the country. Oklahoma City, Okla., district attorneys have sent record numbers of defendants to death row using any means necessary—even tactics later found by courts to be unethical.

The issues surrounding Glossip’s trial haven’t been enough to overturn his conviction, though, and he has spent the past 18 years fighting to prove his innocence.

In April, pro bono attorneys came to his defense, hoping to highlight the gaps in his case.

Within months, the team uncovered new evidence they believed could exonerate Glossip. The news broke, drawing international headlines, a mob of advocates, and the outpouring of support from celebrity anti-death penalty figures, including Susan Sarandon, Richard Branson, and Pope Francis.

Even so, by Sept. 30, Glossip’s defense team had run out of appeals—and time.

Glossip’s execution day had arrived. Up until then, Glossip had spent weeks barely sleeping or eating, held in isolation, enduring the harsh Oklahoma Department of Corrections death penalty protocol.

RELATED: Oklahoma Death Row Inmate Richard Glossip Details His Execution Experience

In the final hours, his attorneys crowded into a tiny chamber connected to a holding cell, for one last meeting.

Glossip glanced repeatedly at the door waiting for a knock that might indicate that his execution had been halted. In a last-minute attempt to stop the execution, his attorneys had filed a plea to the Supreme Court.

That knock would never come.

“It was apparent to me that we weren’t going to get the stay while we were with him,” Don Knight, Glossip’s attorney, recalls.

Glossip turned to look at Knight through the large window that separated them. Knight says it was then that he noticed the gauntness of his client’s face and how hollowed out he had become. But in Glossip’s tired eyes, Knight says he also saw hope—and he struggled with how to say goodbye.

The guards had already opened the door to where Knight was sitting. It was time for him to leave.

“I looked through the glass and met his eyes and just said the only thing I could think to fit the moment,” Knight explains. “I just said to him, ’You know, I will see you the next time I am down here.’”

“Yup,” Glossip responded. “I will see you the next time.”

With handcuffed wrists, Glossip fistbumped his attorney through the window.

“And that was that,” Knight adds.

Neither could have guessed that the meeting wouldn’t be the last. Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections failed to secure the correct drugs required to legally execute Glossip, and as a result, his execution was temporarily put on hold.

This alarming breach of lethal injection protocol finally provoked Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin to grant a 37-day stay for Glossip and two other inmates headed for the execution chamber, while state officials conducted an investigation into the drug mix-up.

Glossip believes that the newfound publicity surrounding his case has saved his life thus far.

“I think if I didn’t have the attorneys that I had, and all these people—millions of people around the world—watching they would have executed me,” he shares via telephone from his cell. “Because they knew people were going to look into this—they wasn’t goin’ to say OK, he’s dead now, we will just move on. They knew that wasn’t going to happen. I think that’s what caused me to get that stay.”

Anti-death penalty advocates have cited the issue as an indication that the state is ill-equipped to handle executions. The Supreme Court, however, doesn’t agree.

Glossip and other Oklahoma death row inmates filed an action in federal court, challenging the constitutionality of lethal injection protocol—specifically the drug midazolam—citing the risk of botched executions as cruel and unusual punishment. In June of 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of lethal injections, allowing executions to move forward.

The drug mix-up came 17 months after 38-year-old convicted murderer Clayton Lockett was left writhing on the table for close to 45 minutes in the state’s death chamber during his botched execution in 2014.

The incident was later described as a “bloody mess” by the prison warden. White House press secretary Jay Carney stated, “We have a fun­da­ment­al stand­ard in this coun­try that even when the death pen­alty is jus­ti­fied, it must be car­ried out hu­manely. And I think every­one would re­cog­nize that this case fell short of that stand­ard.”

State officials admitted in October that Charles Warner, the next inmate executed after Lockett, received the incorrect drug protocol. Warner’s execution lasted 18 minutes.

Although Warner showed no physical signs of distress, he did remark, “My body is on fire.” His attorney later stated they couldn’t be certain whether or not he suffered, thanks to the second drug—a paralytic—administered to him.

“We are just asking for our day in court—that’s all.” Richard Glossip

On Oct. 16, Oklahoma officials announced they would not schedule any executions until 2016 and will wait at least 150 days following the conclusion of the attorney general’s investigation. It’s unclear how much longer Glossip has left to live.

But, in a strange twist, the state’s egregious errors have opened a new window of opportunity for Glossip’s legal team to try to save his life.

“If they give me a new trial and they let us go to court with what we got right now—with what Don Knight and them have been able to find—I will go home. I got no doubt in my mind,” Glossip says. “We are just asking for our day in court—that’s all.”

But it won’t be an easy fight.

Although Glossip’s pending execution garnered international attention and criticism due to the startling lack of evidence and the inadequacy of the overloaded indigent defense system, the burden of proof no longer lies with the prosecution. Glossip’s legal team will have to convince the courts that their client wasn’t responsible for the murder—if they can even get their new evidence in front of a judge.

“By the time I got on this case, all of Mr. Glossip’s appeals had been exhausted,” Knight shared during a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) session about the case. “We need to find and present evidence of his actual innocence in order to get back into court.”

* * * * *

Justin Sneed was 18 years old when he rolled into Oklahoma City on July 3, 1996. He was joining his step-brother Wes Taylor, as part of a roofing crew. The job enabled Sneed to send money back home to his wife and two young daughters in Texas. He was trying to get his life back on track.

Sneed dropped out of school after being kicked out of the eighth grade for fighting with both students and teachers. In 1997, he told a forensic psychologist that he “used to ‘reject authority’ and grew up as a boy who often got into trouble.”

During his teenage years, he was put on a year’s probation for both a burglary and a bomb threat—two crimes he has since attributed to negative influence from friends.

The trouble didn’t end when he arrived at the Best Budget Inn in Oklahoma City. Drug dealers frequented the motel, and Sneed started tapping into a steady supply of methamphetamine sold there. Sneed quit his job at the roofing company not too long after his arrival and decided to stay at the motel indefinitely.

Taylor, Sneed’s stepbrother, also chose to leave his roofing job and worked out a deal with Glossip, who was the manager of the Best Budget Inn. Glossip gave them a free room in exchange for some maintenance work. In the end, Taylor returned to Texas to turn himself into authorities for an unrelated crime. Sneed stayed behind.

Sneed would only spend about six months living and working at the motel before he would brutally murder the owner of the Best Budget Inn, 54-year-old Barry Van Treese.

Twice a month, Van Treese would stop by to inspect the premises. He’d then collect the receipts, and finalize payroll. He would usually spend the night in room 102.

On Jan. 7, 1997 at 2 AM, Van Treese’s car pulled into the motel parking lot. He was returning from another of his motel properties in Tulsa and had plans to stick around Oklahoma City for a week to conduct an audit and do some repairs.

About an hour went by before Sneed used his master key and crept into room 102. He brought with him an aluminum baseball bat that he had found in another room.

At the sound of the door opening, Van Treese jolted awake and sprang from his bed. Sneed approached him and swung hard—but Van Treese fought back.

Caught in the scuffle that ensued, Sneed fell backward, inadvertently smashing the window with the end of the bat. As Van Treese tried to make it out the door, Sneed grabbed him by the back of his nightshirt, pulled him to the ground, and tried to stab him in the chest with a pocket knife. Van Treese rolled onto his stomach and that’s when Sneed began repeatedly striking him with the bat, beating his employer to death.

Details of the murder itself have not been called into question. The official record of what happened that night—and the events leading up to it—comes directly from Sneed’s testimony. His story, however, hasn’t always remained consistent and contradicts some of what other witnesses reported. Sneed has also repeatedly changed his description of Glossip’s involvement.

By Sneed’s latest account Glossip had asked him several times to kill Van Treese—each time offering a larger cash reward. But around 3 AM the night of the incident in question, Sneed says Glossip stirred him awake and warned that it was now or never—if he didn’t kill Van Treese, they would both be out of a job and a home.

Sneed alleged that Glossip was worried he would be fired when Van Treese discovered the property had fallen into disrepair.

The motel was never exactly an upscale establishment, thanks to multiple drug busts, prostitution, and drunken brawls that happened there regularly. Still, it was a profitable business, and Glossip had proven to be a decent motel manager, even receiving a bonus nearly every month in 1996 for exceeding Van Treese’s monthly income goals.

There were some issues with the accounting books, though, which the prosecution used to corroborate Sneed’s suggested motive. Van Treese’s wife would testify that the Oklahoma City Best Budget Inn was short more than $6,000 in receipts at the time of the murder and motel manager Glossip was on the hook for the discrepancy. The Best Budget Inn’s financial records were destroyed years earlier in a flood.

But according to Kenneth Van Treese, the late motel owner’s brother, those shortages were actually quite small. He testified in 2004 that his brother wouldn’t have been concerned over the “really insignificant amounts of money,” because the Best Budget Inn was a “very profitable operation.”

Still, the prosecution focused minimally on details leading up to the murder. What they used to convince juries to convict Glossip was his behavior after the murder took place.

Sneed left room 102 in the early hours on Jan. 7 and changed out of his blood-drenched clothes. He then went to wake up Glossip. By Sneed’s account, Glossip then gave him instructions to retrieve a cash-filled envelope from Van Treese’s car and move the vehicle off the premises.

Sneed says they would meet back in his room afterward to divvy up the money.

The envelope contained around $4,000, which Sneed says the two split. Then, Sneed claims, they returned to the crime scene. Once inside room 102, Sneed alleges that Glossip took $100 from Van Treese’s wallet and told Sneed to clean up the broken glass and fix the window. Sneed taped a shower curtain over the interior, broke the tumbler off the door lock so no one could enter, and turned up the air conditioning to mask the smell.

Throughout the next day, Glossip didn’t mention Sneed’s confession. Around 8:30 AM, he and Sneed affixed a sheet of plexiglass over the window of room 102 and told other motel employees that the damage was caused by two drunks who brawled in the room—even though that was normally where Van Treese stayed.

In the afternoon, Glossip took his girlfriend out to run errands. They stopped by a jewelry store, and he purchased a $100 ring for her before they headed to Walmart. There, he was paged to the front for a phone call—Van Treese’s car had been found.

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The car was parked askew at a credit union adjacent to the motel with Sneed’s soda from the night before still in the cup holder. Sneed claims it was then that Glossip told him to make a run for it. Sneed grabbed the money he had stolen from Van Treese, got on his skateboard, and headed out of town. Glossip stayed behind.

Around 10 PM, Van Treese’s body was discovered face down in the blood-spattered room, covered with bed linens. Soon after, Glossip was brought in for questioning. It was then that he first told police that he thought Sneed had something to do with the murder. It wasn’t until the second interview with police that Glossip admitted Sneed had actually informed him of the murder in the early hours of the morning.

Glossip was released after that interview and quickly began selling off his belongings, including a futon, an entertainment system, two vending machines, and an aquarium.

He was arrested the next day on Jan. 9. Glossip had $1,200 in cash on him—investigators believed it was his share of Van Treese’s money. He later explained the money came from the possessions that he had sold in an attempt to raise enough money to afford a lawyer. Glossip was apprehended that day, while leaving a lawyer’s office.

None of Glossip’s DNA was ever recovered at the crime scene. That’s why the prosecution presented his actions as corroboration for Sneed’s testimony and continue to rely on them as the sole argument to persuade judges to deny his appeals today. According to a clemency hearing put together by the Oklahoma attorney general in 2014, Glossip’s actions and statements in the days following Van Treese’s murder are “the primary evidence connecting him with the murder.”

Glossip has never denied that he withheld information about Sneed’s confession and has admitted several times that was a mistake. Regardless, Glossip wasn’t convicted of covering up the crime: The District Attorney declined a lesser charge of accessory to murder, opting instead for first degree malice aforethought murder. That means the courts believe Sneed knew when he broke into room 102 that night that he was going to murder Van Treese—all because Glossip had asked him to. Now, in order to gain his freedom, Glossip will have to prove he wasn’t involved in any planning of the crime.

Knight, Glossip’s attorney, believes that new evidence uncovered since he took the case back in April would be enough to convince a jury. He highlights Sneed’s personal history and emphasizes that the fluctuating details of Sneed’s account over time as strong indication his story isn’t true.

“He found something at the Best Budget Inn that he loved more than his daughter,” Knight says. “Methamphetamine—this case was nothing other than a meth-head looking for money and a murder happens. It’s the simplest of all stories.”

Richard Allan Barrett, a former drug dealer who used to sell at the Best Budget Inn, was tracked down by Knight and his team to add weight to Knight’s assertion. In an affidavit, Barrett describes Sneed as an addict who would trade items he had stolen in exchange for drugs.

“I specifically recall Justin Sneed bringing the following items to trade for drugs: food stamps ([trading] $150 in stamps for $100 of drugs), radar detectors, car stereos, a Samsonite silver hard-covered briefcase, and, on one occasion, a nickel-plated .38 caliber handgun,” Barrett wrote in his affidavit. He added that, “Justin Sneed was addicted to methamphetamine in a bad way.”

Sneed admits to using methamphetamine around the time the murder took place and was likely under the influence when police arrested him a week after, on Jan. 14, 1997.

It was then that he confessed to investigators that he murdered Van Treese but said he had only intended on knocking him unconscious—that this was a burglary gone wrong. He made no mention of Glossip until the officers did.

“I just only, like, hit him two or three times,” Sneed said during his interrogation. “I figured I would just knock him out.”

Throughout the interrogation, Sneed was pushed to implicate Glossip. The officers told Sneed that Glossip had already blamed him for the murder. Detectives then said they were certain Sneed wasn’t behind the crime.

“We have worked on it ever since it’s happened,” the officers told Sneed. “I think we know what was happened. Some stuff I know we know, some stuff we think we know, and we would like for you to straighten us out for sure. But we want to know whose idea it was.”

By the end of the interrogation, Sneed had changed his story. He told them Glossip had offered him cash to commit the crime.

Using video and transcripts from that confession, Richard A. Leo, an expert on police-induced false confessions, reports “the suggestion that Richard Glossip was involved in the homicide of of Barry Van Treese first came from investigators, not Justin Sneed. The investigators feed Justin Sneed their theory that Richard Glossip was the mastermind of this homicide, and they repeatedly tell him that Richard Glossip was putting the crime on him.”

Sneed himself agrees that their interrogation tactics were unfair—even if he maintains that he told the investigators the truth.

“I will say that it was manipulative,” Sneed told The Frontier in September. “A week later, I am still probably not in my right mind to grasp the concept that I just did all that.”

Other parts of Sneed’s story also don’t line up with what other witnesses have described. In two separate accounts, unrelated motel guests testified that they heard people arguing in room 102 before commotion broke out, which contradicts Sneed’s version that he went in swinging.

Two inmates who served time with Sneed on separate occasions—Michael Scott and Joseph Tapley—say they heard him discuss the murder while behind bars.

Scott told Glossip’s lawyers that he “heard Justin Sneed say that, in his statements and testimony, [Sneed] set Richard Glossip up, and that Richard Glossip didn’t do anything. Among all the inmates, it was common knowledge that Justin Sneed lied and sold Richard Glossip up the river.”

Tapley, meanwhile, submitted an affidavit that Sneed never mentioned anyone else who was involved, and “the only thing that mattered to him was signing [on] for a life sentence.’”

Even one of Sneed’s daughters, O’Ryan Justine Sneed, came forward to say that her father had considered recanting—something he now denies. In an email, she wrote that she believed her father had lied to avoid the death penalty. That email was written with the intention for use in Glossip’s defense.

O’Ryan’s family admonished her after the email was leaked to the media, and she has since ceased contact with members of Glossip’s campaign. O’Ryan did not respond to interview requests for this article.

Although Sneed has stood by his story, the case against Glossip is still lacking actual evidence. During the retrial in 2004, the prosecution relied on medical examiner Dr. Chai Choi and her autopsy findings to make the case that Glossip could have saved Van Treese’s life as he laid on the floor of that motel room. Choi testified that it took Van Treese several hours to die—a fact now heavily contested by experts.

Forensic pathologist Dr. Shaku Teas submitted an affidavit in September 2015, stating she believes Choi mischaracterized the autopsy findings and provided “expert testimony based on no medically accepted evidence.”

“If we had DNA, we would have won in the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals.” Defense attorney Don Knight

DNA analysis specialist Laura Schile worked with Choi in the Oklahoma City Police Department crime laboratory. Schile detailed that Choi admitted to altering her findings in another case.

“I was shocked at the statement that she would be willing to change her manner of death dependent on the wishes of the district attorney’s office,” Schile described in an affidavit.

Though Knight believes these witnesses and experts could turn the tide in a courtroom, the new evidence the defense team had discovered was not enough to convince the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals that Glossip deserved a new hearing. Three judges—a simple majority of the five—ruled against him just two days before his scheduled execution on Sept. 30.

“This is different than DNA [evidence], which the court has accepted as being [a] black-and-white thing,” Knight explains. “If we had DNA, we would have won in the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals.”

Unfortunately, any evidence that might have had DNA on it was destroyed or went missing in 1999.

In September, the Oklahoma City Police Department told a local news station that all that remains at this point is a police report, which calls for the destruction of the box and incorrectly states that all of the appeals had been exhausted.

The order to destroy the evidence is dated Oct. 25, 1999—just five days following the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals call for a fact-finding hearing to investigate claims of “prosecutorial misconduct” in Glossip’s case.

Without hard evidence, the legal team is now searching for something more concrete to present to the courts.

“Our legal options still remain open,” Knight explains. “We can go back to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals when we find new information—and we will. If we have to go back to the United States Supreme Court, we will go there.”

In order to get the new evidence in front of a judge, the defense team will have to find an angle that goes beyond what has already been presented to the courts over the past 18 years. Precedent favors prior convictions, if a judge believes the trial was a fair one. But questions still remain about whether Glossip or not was ever given a real chance.

“The two [judges] that voted for us voted on substantive grounds,” Knight explains. “They said this case was weak from the start and that we should get a hearing. The three judges that voted against us said we really have to back the finality of judgments.”

* * * * *

Glossip had no criminal record before his arrest in 1997. As a result, he was relieved when a lawyer showed up to represent him at all. Attorney Wayne Fournerat had been paid roughly $2,500 to represent Glossip by his brother’s girlfriend.

“I didn’t know what to expect. This attorney came in out of the blue and said I have been paid for, I am your attorney,” Glossip says. “He talked a big game, and I didn’t know what I was looking for.”

Fournerat, who has since been disbarred , was ill-equipped to do the job. He came to trial without having conducted any additional investigations.

“I think if I didn’t have the attorneys that I had, and all these people—millions of people around the world—watching they would have executed me.” Richard Glossip

“It wasn’t a trial, it was a farce,” Glossip explains now. “It was just horrible. [Fournerat] didn’t represent me in any way shape or form.”

Three years after the trial, in 2001, an Oklahoma County District Judge agreed with this sentiment.

“The record as a whole suggests that the trial counsel was not prepared for trial,” Judge Johnson wrote in his ruling . “We find counsel’s performance deficient and we find his failures could not have been part of any sound or reasonable trial strategy.”

Johnson ordered a retrial, throwing out the initial conviction. Public defender G. Lynn Burch was assigned the case and was far more prepared to represent Glossip. Unfortunately, he would never receive the chance.

In a move that he believes was used to pull him off the case, Burch told The Intercept that before the trial, the prosecution announced plans to call him as a witness to convince the court that he had used intimidation tactics while interviewing Sneed.

Burch recused himself so he could refute the claim, leaving Glossip in the hands of the overworked and underfunded Oklahoma Indigent Defense System (OIDS).

“Now I am sitting there in this courtroom, and my attorney is quitting, and I am going, ‘What the hell just happened?’” Glossip says, explaining that the two defenders assigned to his case initially requested to be taken off it. “Neither one of them wanted to represent me because they didn’t know the case that well. Here I am stuck with these two guys. … I ended up with the worst representation that a person could end up with.”

Glossip’s new attorneys failed to conduct a new investigation. Tanya Greene, advocacy and policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), says it was likely a funding issue.

“If you are going to try to kill somebody, you have to fund their defense,” Greene says. “You can’t hamstring attorneys and then scream at them for not doing a great job because you didn’t fund them properly.”

Budgetary problems are endemic to indigent defense systems around the country. “It’s why many of Mr. Glossip’s innocence claims were not properly investigated until right before his execution date,” she says before adding, “The clincher here is funding.”

OIDS has a troubled history of budgetary issues: Only one year after it was founded in 1991, the agency didn’t have enough money to meet its payroll and nearly shut down.

The next decade was wrought with financing shortfalls. By 2002, the agency was forced to layoff members of its small staff. Twenty-seven positions were eliminated, including 10 attorney positions. According to an OIDS annual report, the cutbacks “hindered the agency’s ability to effectively represent its clients.”

In 2004, the year OIDS attorneys represented Glossip, the annual appropriations were around $14 million—a million dollars less than the budget during the funding crisis of 2002.

The number of staff employed was also significantly low. Across the OIDS divisions that represent capital cases, the year ended with 17 attorneys responsible for taking on the agency’s 70 trial-level cases and 15 appeals.

According to a study conducted over a seven-year period by the Judicial Conference of the United States, attorneys spent an average of 1,900 hours defending clients in death penalty trials.

There are 8,760 total hours in a year.

Even if an attorney did nothing but work—and didn’t take time to eat or sleep—there would only be time for just more than four and a half death penalty trials a year. A standard 40-hour work week only allows 2,080 hours—just enough for one trial. Two, if the work is divided between dual defenders, which is the norm.

The indigent defense lawyers who represented Glossip say they can’t recall how many cases they had at the time of his trial in 2004 and declined interview requests for this article.

OIDS Executive Director Joe Robertson, who has served in the capital division since 1994, says they were overloaded.

“[The defenders] had too many cases,” Robertson recalls. “I don’t remember how many cases they tried that year, but they tried several.” He explains that, because of Burch’s conflict of interest, Glossip’s case was given to the public defenders on top of their usual workload.

“The guys that were trying it were taking that on in addition to the normal caseload—it made it difficult,” Robertson explains.

The OIDS funding issues have also impacted more than just their workload.

“[The Indigent Defense office does] not have the experts that we should,” Robertson explains. “We do our best to make sure that we cover all those bases, but the funding is limited. It is not what it should be.”

He admits that the attorneys made mistakes during the trial.

“This case never should have been a death penalty case. The death penalty should be reserved for the worst of the worst, and he certainly doesn’t fit that category.” Joe Robertson, Executive Director of the Oklahoma Indigent Defense System (OIDS)

“Things that could have been brought out to help his case and were not,” Robertson says, “were later discovered.”

The problem persists still today. Robertson says indigent defense attorneys are usually assigned between 12 and 15 death penalty cases each year.

“Yeah, too many. Way too many,” he says soberly. “We need more staff than we can afford—there’s no question about that. We just don’t have the budget for it.”

Even if Glossip’s attorneys had been well-equipped to defend him, they were up against one of the most deadly prosecution offices in the United States.

According to a Death Penalty Information Center report , Oklahoma is one of four states—along with Texas, Virginia, and Florida—responsible for about 60 percent of all executions in America. Oklahoma County, where Glossip was convicted and tried, ranks third highest in number of executions in the country.

It might explain why the prosecution pursued the death penalty against Glossip to begin with—even if it’s undisputed that he didn’t commit the murder himself.

“This case never should have been a death penalty case,” Robertson states. “The death penalty should be reserved for the worst of the worst, and he certainly doesn’t fit that category.”

Knight believes the charge was a way to manipulate Glossip into accepting a plea deal and admitting to orchestrating the crime—something he has repeatedly refused to do.

No matter the reason, Glossip was convicted and given the death penalty. The courts have since refused to rehear the case or the new evidence on procedural grounds. He was denied an appeal in 2007, refused clemency in 2014, and on September 30—the day he was scheduled to die—the US Supreme Court refused to issue him a stay to review his case, but offered no explanation.

For now, his death sentence still stands based on the conviction from his bungled retrial.

Wayne Woodyard, one of the indigent defense attorneys who represented Glossip during that retrial, says it really just points back to a single man.

“I have a policy that I don’t talk about my cases,” Woodyard says sternly over the phone. “All I will say is the Glossip case was tried in part of the era of Bob Macy. You can take a look at the type of atmosphere that was in courtrooms back then.”

* * * * *

In the ‘90s, Oklahoma County was Robert “Cowboy Bob” Macy’s domain. The district attorney was known for his iconic image—western-cut suits, wide-brimmed hats, black string tie, and cowboy boots—and his high body count.

Throughout the course of his career, Macy personally sent a record 54 people to death row and nurtured an entire generation of lawyers and judges who would continue his draconian legacy long after he left the criminal justice system in 2001.

“You go to the US attorney’s office and half of the staff were trained by me,” Macy told The Oklahoma Gazette, before his death in 2011. “I would guess at least 30 percent of the district judges in Oklahoma County were trained by my office.”

He was open about his enthusiasm for the death penalty and was rewarded for it—Oklahoma County citizens re-elected him five times with high margins for his notoriously tough stance.

“If Oklahoma jurors would see Bob Macy walk into a courtroom, you are pretty much toast,” Glossip says. “Especially if you don’t got a good lawyer.”

That toughness often went over the line. He was reprimanded several times by federal and state judges for misconduct in capital cases.

Courts found that he made deliberately false statements in his closing arguments, deceived juries, and “crossed the line between a hard blow and a foul one.”

According to a 2002 ruling by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, “Macy’s persistent misconduct … has without doubt harmed the reputation of Oklahoma’s criminal justice system and left the unenviable legacy of an indelibly tarnished legal career.”

Macy’s office also came under fire in the early 2000s when investigators discovered that the forensic scientist Macy often relied on as an expert witness had faked her findings and withheld evidence that might prove a defendant wasn’t guilty.

Nicknamed “Black Magic” for her ability to give testimonies that convinced juries, Joyce Gilchrist was used in half of Macy’s cases, even after appellate courts criticized her findings as “misleading,” “untruthful,” and “inexcusable.”

She also was responsible for prematurely destroying and losing important evidence—including the box of items from Van Treese’s murder that went missing in 1999.

Both Macy and Gilchrist have since died, but their legacies in Oklahoma’s criminal defense system live on in cases like Glossip’s that might not have otherwise ended with a death penalty conviction.

Still, courts view Glossip’s case as a fair one and, on procedural grounds, have denied him a new day in court. Now his new team of attorneys is working to overcome the shortcomings of his past defenders. It will be difficult, but Robertson says he thinks they have a shot at turning the case around.

“[Glossip] has very, very qualified counsel at this point. They have good resources and are able to devote the time to it that it needs,” Robertson says. “I think they are doing a great job.”

* * * * * *

As Knight left Richard Glossip’s cell on Sept. 30, the day of his scheduled execution, he says his client only expressed appreciation—even if it seemed that all hope was lost.

“He thanked me,” Knight recalls. “He said to me, ‘Everybody has to die sometime, but I didn’t want to die with people thinking I did this—thank you for making it clear that I didn’t.’”

Knight lets out a sigh and pauses.

“For him, maybe that’s OK. But for me it’s not good enough. I need a court hearing,” Knight says. “I just need to get back in front of the judge with these witnesses. These new witnesses are great witnesses and they will turn the tide.”

Given the unforeseen gift of extra time, Knight hopes new witnesses will come forward and that they will discover even more evidence to prove that the system failed Glossip—that he was never involved in the murder of Barry Van Treese.

“We can get a new trial,” Knight says. “But we need a lot of help. So, I am asking everybody: Help.”