Three Times to the Death Chamber, Now Out on Bond
Richard Glossip was scheduled to be executed three times. On Thursday, an Oklahoma judge released him on bond while he awaits a retrial — and reopened the broader question of how a state with this much doubt kept setting dates.
An Oklahoma County judge on Thursday allowed Richard Glossip — the former death-row prisoner whose case the US Supreme Court ordered retried after the state's own attorney general acknowledged prosecutorial misconduct — to be released on bond pending that retrial.
Glossip's path to this morning's hearing has been long enough to become a stand-alone argument about capital punishment. He was scheduled for execution three separate times. Each pause came not from a finding of innocence but from the slow surfacing of evidence that the original prosecution had withheld from the defence.
The retrial, when it comes, will turn on the credibility of the original informant. The bond decision turns on something simpler: a judgment that, after twenty-eight years, the state is no longer entitled to keep him incarcerated while it figures out whether it can convict him again.
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