Jordan Smith of the Austin Chronicle has provided some of the most comprehensive news coverage of developments in the Rodney Reed case over the years. The Court of Criminal Appeals' recent decision is the topic of her latest, "No Relief for Rodney Reed."
Reed's case has been wading through the courts for nearly 10 years; his
defenders have consistently questioned whether prosecutors withheld
potentially exculpatory evidence. After a 2006 hearing on the matter in
a Bastrop Co. district court, Judge Reva Towslee Corbett (whose
father presided over Reed's original trial) concluded that there was
not credible evidence to suggest the state had done anything wrong. In
part because the judge simply adopted whole the findings of fact
provided her by the state at the conclusion of the hearing, the CCA
took up Reed's appeal to decide whether certain inaccuracies in those
conclusions were enough to trigger some relief for Reed. But last week,
the court ruled that they were not. A "few of the trial judge's fact
findings were either unsupported by the record or appeared, in some
fashion, to be misleading," Judge Michael Keasler wrote for the
court. "Mindful of the role of an advocate, the trial judge as a
neutral arbiter should have more carefully scrutinized the state's
proposed findings to ensure that they accurately reflect the evidence
before adopting them verbatim." Though Towslee Corbett did not do so –
thus "unnecessarily complicating" its review of the case – the court
ultimately found that the evidence the state withheld was not credible
and would not have swayed a jury to acquit Reed. This conclusion is
puzzling to Reed's attorney Bryce Benjet, who wonders how the
CCA could simply rubber-stamp Towslee Corbett's findings after
criticizing her for accepting the state's findings verbatim.
And:
Reed attorney Benjet says the ruling is, among other things,
frustrating – in part, because the court still has pending before it
three other related appeals concerning misconduct in Reed's case. "What
is frustrating is that every time we learn a new fact, [the court]
won't just let you go tell them about it. They require you to file a
new appeal," he said, and that may be part of the reason the court
considers the defense's theories incomplete. "They force us to proceed
in this fashion and then say that we haven't presented this in a
coherent fashion?"
Earlier coverage of the CCA ruling is here; the Rodney Reed index, here.
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