Her Mentor Sent Richard Glossip to Death Row. Can She Give Him a Fair Trial?
Inside her chambers at the Oklahoma County Courthouse, Judge Susan Stallings was defending her refusal to step down from the third trial of Richard Glossip when she made a startling admission to his defense attorneys. It was September 4, 2025, and Glossip’s legal team had just persuaded a different judge to recuse herself from the case the second Oklahoma City judge to do so since August. Like Stallings, both judges were former prosecutors. Both had stepped down due to their ties to the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office. Now Stallings was explaining why she believed that she could be impartial in presiding over the high-profile trial. To do so, however, Stallings needed to address her relationship with Fern Smith, the former Oklahoma City prosecutor who first sent Glossip to death row. Glossip’s lawyers already knew that Stallings had worked for Smith during her own time at the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office in the early 1990s. And they knew that Stallings had gone on to praise Smith as a formative influence. “When I started in the DA’s office right out of law school, Fern Smith taught me that we were to seek justice not just convictions,” Stallings told Briefcase, a publication of the Oklahoma County Bar Association, upon taking the bench in 2019. “I’ve never forgotten that.” But now Stallings was volunteering a new bit of information about her connection to Smith. “We took a trip,” Stallings told the lawyers. “There was a group of us that took a trip.” The year was 1997, and Glossip had recently been charged with masterminding the brutal killing of his boss, Barry Van Treese, at an Oklahoma City motel. The evidence against Glossip was thin; prosecutors were relying on the word of a 19-year-old motel employee named Justin Sneed, who admitted to beating Van Treese to death with a baseball bat but claimed that Glossip had coerced him into doing it. As Glossip sat in the county jail insisting he was innocent, Stallings was apparently vacationing in Spain with Smith, the lead prosecutor in the case. If the judge’s revelation supported the case for her recusal, Stallings seemed intent on downplaying its significance. The vacation had included a bunch of people from the DA’s office, she explained. “We got a really good deal on the airfare.” The colleagues landed in Madrid and rented cars to drive to Costa del Sol and Gibraltar. During the ride to Gibraltar, Stallings said, Smith “wasn’t even in the same car with me.” Defense attorney Corbin Brewster asked Stallings if she had discussed any of the cases Smith was handling at the DA’s office while they were in Spain. “Good Lord no,” Stallings replied. “That’s not the point of a vacation.” The exchange between Stallings and Glossip’s attorneys took place during a closed-door proceeding known as a Rule 15 hearing, whose purpose is to ask a judge to recuse themselves from a case. A transcript is attached to a subsequent defense motion reiterating the recusal request and arguing that “there is an objectively and constitutionally intolerable risk that Judge Stallings cannot impartially judge issues that must be addressed before this case can proceed.” Under Oklahoma’s Code of Judicial Conduct, judges are supposed to be disqualified from cases “whenever the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” But the decision to recuse is up to the judge. All trials are supposed to be overseen by an independent arbiter who can be fair to both sides. This would seem especially urgent in Glossip’s case, which has famously laid bare disturbing misconduct in the Oklahoma County DA’s office. Twice convicted and sentenced to die for a crime he swore he did not commit, Glossip spent 27 years facing execution before finally seeing his conviction vacated by the U. S. Supreme Court, which found that his case was rooted in false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. Not only did prosecutors fail to correct false testimony by Sneed, the justices also found that “additional conduct by the prosecution further undermines confidence in the verdict.” This conduct includes the destruction of evidence between Glossip’s 1998 trial and his 2004 retrial that defense lawyers trace back to Smith. Smith “originated the State’s theory, decided to pursue the death penalty, oversaw key early investigative decisions, and controlled the flow of evidence to the defense,” they wrote in the recusal motion. At the Rule 15 hearing, Brewster told Stallings that Glossip’s legal team planned to challenge the state’s case through pretrial hearings and that the defense would argue that Smith told Oklahoma City detectives to destroy the evidence. “Do you have any concerns about being impartial with respect to Fern Smith’s credibility or whether she engaged in misconduct?” he asked. No, Stallings said. “I went from being an advocate at the District Attorney’s Office to being an impartial arbiter on this bench,” she told Brewster. “And I take that very seriously in the very marrow of my bones.” The question of Stallings’s impartiality will be at the heart of an evidentiary hearing on October 30 in Oklahoma County District Court, where Glossip’s attorneys plan to probe the judge’s connections to the Oklahoma County DA’s office. “The extent of Judge Stallings’s true relationship with Fern Smith is unclear,” they wrote in a filing on October 20. The hearing is necessary “to discern the extent of this relationship.” The hearing is peculiar in that Stallings will be considering testimony about her own ability to be impartial and ultimately rule on whether or not to recuse herself from Glossip’s case. Under Oklahoma law, if she again refuses to step down, Glossip’s legal team can turn to the “chief judge of the county where the case is pending,” followed by the state Supreme Court. Although the court docket shows several subpoenas sent to unnamed witnesses, it is not entirely clear who will take the stand at the hearing. Among the most significant potential witnesses is Smith herself, as well as her former boss, former Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater, who once called Glossip’s innocence claim a “bullshit PR campaign.” Prater, who served as elected DA from 2007 until 2022, hired Stallings as a prosecutor in 2010 the second time she was employed at the office. Stallings worked under Prater until 2018, the year she won her election to Oklahoma County’s criminal court. It was during these same years that Prater went to extreme lengths to keep Glossip’s conviction intact. The case dates back to a notorious era in Oklahoma City, when the DA’s office was under the leadership of Robert “Cowboy Bob” Macy, who won 54 death sentences during his tenure and became known for his overzealous prosecutions. Prater, who worked under Macy, took it upon himself as DA to defend Glossip’s conviction at all costs, using the same kinds of tactics that made his predecessor so controversial. As Glossip faced execution in 2015, Prater was accused of intimidating witnesses who came forward with new information. Glossip’s defense team does not claim that Stallings had anything to do with Prater’s actions at the time. But they argue that her broader relationship with Prater is cause for concern. Although Stallings insisted at the Rule 15 hearing that she would treat Prater “like I do anybody else,” Glossip’s lawyers argue that, as with Smith, Stallings cannot be impartial in determining Prater’s credibility if and when he is called to answer for his conduct in the case. The evidentiary hearing comes nearly five months after Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who is running for governor, stunned Glossip’s advocates by announcing that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder. After spending years fighting to prevent Glossip’s execution testifying on his behalf at a 2023 clemency hearing, then joining his attorneys in challenging the case before the Supreme Court Drummond’s decision came despite a lack of reliable evidence to prove the state’s case. It was also an apparent betrayal of a secret deal the attorney general had previously made with Glossip’s attorney Don Knight to swiftly resolve the case and let his client walk free. Glossip’s attorneys have repeatedly argued that their client cannot receive a fair trial let alone in a courtroom where the presiding judge once worked for the very same office behind his discredited conviction. The corruption at the root of Glossip’s case was part of a “longstanding culture of misconduct in the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office,” they write. During the Rule 15 hearing, Brewster said the defense team is “seeking to recuse any judge who served in the Oklahoma County DA’s Office.” In their reply to Glossip’s recusal motion, prosecutors argue that his legal team vastly overstates Stallings’s connection to Prater. Glossip’s attorneys invoke Stallings’s “friendship and admiration” for her former boss, they write, but such a description is a “leap.” As for Stallings’s connection to Smith, the prosecutors write that “the defendant has conjured an enduring friendship” that is “simply incompatible with reality.” Putting aside a court appearance in a different case earlier this year, they write, Stallings and Smith were last in contact 28 years ago, “when both happened to be members of a group trip abroad.” Yet the court appearance cited by prosecutors is a good example of the potential conflict Glossip’s lawyers describe. Before Stallings was assigned to preside over Glossip’s retrial, her impartiality had already been questioned in the case of Tremane Wood, who was also sentenced to death in Oklahoma City in 2004 and who faces execution on November 13. Wood won an evidentiary hearing earlier this year to determine whether prosecutors committed misconduct in his case. The prosecutor in question was Fern Smith. Stallings was appointed to preside over the hearing. Wood’s attorneys requested that Stallings recuse herself from the hearing. As in Glossip’s case, she refused. In an affidavit subsequently attached to Glossip’s recusal motion, federal public defender Amanda Bass Castro Alves described a scene with striking parallels to the Rule 15 hearing in Glossip’s case. During an “in-chambers discussion, Judge Stallings stated that she had been on a trip with Fern Smith,” Bass Castro Alves said. “I don’t specifically recall where they traveled to or the timeframe of the trip. However, I do recall that Judge Stallings referred to the trip as a ‘hen do.’” It’s not clear whether the trip was the same international vacation Stallings disclosed to Glossip’s attorneys. A “hen do” is akin to a bachelorette party a gathering of the closest friends of a bride-to-be which is not at all how Stallings described the trip to Spain. “The contrast in two descriptions suggests that either the nature of the trip to Spain was different than what Judge Stallings disclosed, or that there have been multiple trips with different purposes and tone,” Glossip’s attorneys argue. “Under either circumstance, it is reasonable to conclude that Judge Stallings could not fairly and impartially rule on the credibility of Ms. Smith.” Stallings presided over Wood’s evidentiary hearing in April 2025 and ultimately ruled against him. Glossip’s lawyers argue that Stallings’s opinion in the case evinces loyalty toward Smith, a position supported by attorney and scholar Abbe Smith, a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center who specializes in legal ethics. In a report attached as an exhibit to the latest defense filing, Professor Smith notes that Stallings “devotes more pages to Fern Smith’s testimony than anyone else’s . and does not merely find her testimony ‘credible,’ the terse description she uses for others, she ‘finds credible Ms. Smith’s resolute testimony,’ adding a flourish that suggests Ms. Smith was somehow more than credible.” Whether Stallings was persuaded to rule against Wood because she was secretly biased in Fern Smith’s favor is ultimately not the point. As the legal ethics professor notes, the question of recusal is not based on whether a judge is too biased to preside over a case, but whether a judge might look biased to an outside observer. “Appearances matter,” Abbe Smith writes. “The very first Canon in Oklahoma’s judicial code requires judges to avoid not only ‘impropriety,’ but the appearance of impropriety.” This standard is rooted in the need to preserve the legal system’s legitimacy in the eyes of the public, Abbe Smith explains. But it serves a practical purpose too. “Lawyers are often reluctant to make recusal motions for fear of antagonizing judges,” she writes. “It is helpful for a lawyer to be able to point out that a recusal motion is not personal.” The standard also “relieves a judge from feeling that they are admitting to shameful prejudice and bias. Instead, it is a matter of appearances.” In Oklahoma City, concerns over appearances have not traditionally proven to be much of a deterrent. The contentious fight over Glossip’s case and the state’s death penalty in general has frequently spilled into public view, particularly where the DA’s office has been involved. Among Prater’s final moves as DA was the targeting of Oklahoma’s board of pardon and parole for showing mercy to people facing execution; Prater repeatedly sought to disqualify individual board members from considering death penalty cases. In Glossip’s case, a newly retired Prater showed up at his 2023 clemency hearing to telegraph his anger over Drummond’s decision to testify on Glossip’s behalf. With Drummond’s decision to retry Glossip, the attorney general has found common ground with the Macy-era prosecutors who sent Glossip to death row. The attorney general has insisted he “will make sure Mr. Glossip receives a fair trial.” But allowing Stallings to preside clearly undermines this commitment, defense lawyers argue. Both sides should want a presiding judge who can be seen as unbiased. Fighting for Stallings to stay on sends the message that “the game is already rigged.”.
https://theintercept.com/2025/10/29/richard-glossip-judge-recusals-susan-stallings/
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