For the last four months, Richard Glossip and his wife, Lea, have had a regular Monday ritual. Glossip calls Lea from his death row cell first thing in the morning. Lea makes coffee in her Oklahoma City apartment while they talk. And then she opens the computer. “We would open the docket and check the orders list from the Supreme Court,” she said. “It’s always a huge moment that’s wrapped up with so many emotions and this kind of terrifying anticipation.”

In May, the court blocked Glossip’s looming execution while it decided whether to take up his most recent appeal. The couple knew that a decision wouldn’t come before the fall. But fall came and went as they dutifully made their weekly docket checks. Glossip’s case just wasn’t there. The court kept putting off its decision. Over time, they grew comfortable not knowing, relieved to be able to enjoy the holidays in relative peace after a long and stressful year.

Then on January 22, there it was. “All of a sudden, I said, ‘It’s there. I see Glossip.’” The court had decided to review the case. “I told him, ‘It’s granted! It’s granted!’”

Lea felt a rush of emotion. “It was really overwhelming.” She told Glossip to call his lawyer, Don Knight. “We’re going to Washington,” Knight responded.

The truth is that the situation is both a blessing and a curse. Glossip has learned the hard way not to put his faith in the Supreme Court. Nearly 10 years ago, Glossip was the named plaintiff in a challenge to Oklahoma’s controversial new lethal injection protocol. After oral arguments in the spring of 2015, the justices quickly dismissed concerns that the method could amount to torture. The ruling greased the wheels for Glossip’s execution, which would have gone forward later that year if not for a last-minute revelation that the state had procured the wrong combination of drugs, forcing it to call things off. The state later revealed that it had already used the same erroneous protocol to execute a different man.

The fallout over Glossip’s near-execution was swift. The state issued a moratorium on executions and convened a bipartisan commission to study Oklahoma’s death penalty from top to bottom. In 2017, the commission issued a sweeping indictment of the system. Among its conclusions: The state of Oklahoma had condemned innocent people to death. The commission also offered a host of recommendations for reform; to date, virtually none of them have been implemented. In 2021, Oklahoma restarted executions using the same three-drug protocol as before.

Meanwhile, Glossip’s case began to draw more national attention — particularly after Investigation Discovery aired documentarian Joe Berlinger’s four-part series on the case. “Killing Richard Glossip,” which was inspired by The Intercept’s reporting, revealed evidence that undercut the state’s case against Glossip, while prompting new witnesses to come forward with information that bolstered his innocence claim. It also galvanized an unlikely........

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