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

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