Molly Bloom reports, "Rodney Reed's lawyers tell appeals court that he deserves a new trial," in the Austin American-Statesman.
If a Bastrop County jury had heard all of the evidence in the 1998 trial of Rodney Reed, the jurors would never have convicted him of raping and killing 19-year-old Stacey Stites and given him the death penalty, Reed's lawyers told the state's highest criminal court Wednesday morning.
Reed is awaiting execution for killing Stites, whose body was found on the side of a Bastrop road in 1996. Reed has said the two were having a secret affair even though Stites was engaged to former Giddings police officer Jimmy Fennell Jr. when she was abducted, raped and strangled.
"This court can do what it needs to do to correct a miscarriage of justice," Morris Overstreet, one of Reed's appeal lawyers and a former state appeals court judge, told the nine-member Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
Neither side introduced new evidence Wednesday. Instead, the defense argued that evidence discovered after Reed's trial demonstrates his innocence and compels the court to grant him a new trial.
The state and Stites' sister say that the right man is behind bars.
Reed's lawyers, Overstreet and Bryce Benjet, argued Wednesday that he deserves a new trial. They said prosecutors didn't tell Reed's lawyers about evidence in the case, including the state's DNA analysis results of beer cans found near Stites' body that the contend could link fellow Giddings police officer David Hall, a friend of Fennell's, to the crime scene.
They also said prosecutors didn't tell Reed's defense lawyers about a woman who said she saw Stites and Fennell together the morning of her death and a police academy classmate of Fennell's who said she heard Fennell say that he would strangle his girlfriend with a belt if he found out that she cheated on him.
The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed Reed's conviction in 2000 and rejected his request for a new hearing in 2002.
And:
Overstreet joined Reed's defense in 2005, when the Texas Defender Service, which represents death row inmates, asked him to volunteer on the Reed case, before a hearing on the new evidence in a Bastrop County district court.
"I was convinced that Rodney Reed was innocent of this, and so I agreed to help," said Overstreet, who was at the time a law professor at Texas Southern University.
Reed, who is African American, has said that racism played a role in what he says was a rush to convict him of killing Stites, who was white.
AP's Michael Graczyk writes, "Condemned inmate's lawyers say new evidence should mean new trial," via the San Antonio Express-News.
With about a dozen relatives and supporters of condemned inmate Rodney Reed crowded into a packed courtroom, the convicted killer's lawyers asked the state's highest criminal court Wednesday to grant him a new trial for the rape-slaying of a Central Texas woman 12 years ago.
"Mr. Reed has proclaimed his innocence since Day 1," Morris Overstreet, one of his lawyers, told the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, where he served a term as a judge in the 1990s. "Even though he now stands convicted, he maintains he is innocent of this offense."
Reed, who is black, is awaiting execution for the abduction, rape and strangling of a 19-year-old white woman, Stacey Stites, in Bastrop County, about 30 miles southeast of Austin. Reed has contended the two were having a secret affair, even though Stites was engaged to soon marry a police officer when she was killed.
Stites' sister said after the nearly hourlong hearing that the right man was in prison.
And:
Overstreet said there's no timetable for a decision, which could come anywhere from two to six months from now. Although each side was allowed 20 minutes to present its arguments, the judges — seven members of the nine-judge court were present — extended the time considerably as they peppered attorneys with questions about the legal issues in the case.
"The most they can do is to order a new trial," Overstreet said. "Our position is if the jury at the time of the trial had an opportunity to view all of the evidence we know now exists, they would have made a different decision."
In addition to the coverage linked in this post yesterday, News 8 Austin's Catie Beck filed a slightly different version of the story later in the day, here, with links to some of the pleadings.
Streaming video reports are also available from Fox 7 (KTBC-TV), KEYE-TV, KVUE-TV, and KXAN-TV
The Rodney Reed index is here.
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