The Rodney Reed case from Bastrop has long been held up as a possible innocent on Texas death row. The case is getting new attention because a Georgetown police officer implicated in the Reed case has been indicted in an unrelated matter. On Saturday, Isadora Vail of the Austin American-Statesman reported, "Georgetown officer accused of raping intoxicated woman."
After Georgetown police Sgt. Jimmy Lewis Fennell Jr. detained a highly intoxicated woman during a domestic disturbance call, he drove her to what she thought was a park, asked her to dance for him and then raped her as she leaned against his police cruiser, according to court records.
Fennell, who was arrested this week and charged with the Oct. 26 assault, reportedly ignored her pleas to stop, according to a search warrant affidavit released Friday.
His arrest has brought renewed attention to the 1996 murder of his fiancée, in which investigators dismissed Fennell as a suspect. Rodney Reed was convicted of her murder and sent to death row.
And:
Fennell has been with the Georgetown department about nine years. In 1996, he was a Giddings police officer, engaged to 19-year-old Stacey Stites; she was strangled and found on the side of a dirt road north of Bastrop on April 23.
Rodney Reed was sentenced to death in 1998 for killing Stites and is waiting for a ruling on an appeal. His defense attorneys have long held up Fennell as a possible suspect in the killing..
Reed's attorney, Bryce Benjet, said this week that the charges against Fennell, if true, could have a significant impact on Reed's appeal for a new trial.
The Statesman had filed a Freedom of Information request to obtain information on the indictment.
Jim Harrington, Executive Director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, has released a statement:
"It has always been the defense position of Rodney Reed that Fennell actually killed the victim, Stacey Stites, who was Fennell's girl friend at the time, because Reed was having an affair with her. This is especially salient in view of the earlier post-trial testimony, after Reed's conviction, by Mary Blackwell that Fennell had bragged to a classmate in the police academy that he would strangle his girlfriend, using a belt to prevent fingerprints, if he learned she was cheating on him.
"In light of these rather stunning developments that dramatically support Reed's claims of Fennell's violent character, the courts should reverse Reed's conviction and set a new trial."
TCRP has been active in Reed's case.
Earlier coverage is here, here, and here. Jordan Smith of our independent alt-weekly Austin Chronicle has reported extensively on the case, including "Who Killed Stacy Stites," in May 2002; "Hidden Evidence?," in March 2006, and; "Reed Appeal Shot Down," in June 2006.
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