"Judge Recommends Rejecting Rodney Reed Appeal," is the title of Jordan Smith's report in the Austin Chronicle. Here's the opening:
In an 82-page report to District Judge Lee Yeakel, federal Magistrate Judge Andrew Austin on June 15 recommended that the federal appeal of Rodney Reed be denied. Reed was convicted and sentenced to die in 1998 for the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites, after DNA found on vaginal swabs taken from Stites were an affirmative match for Reed. "If Reed has no innocent explanation for the sperm found in ... Stites' vagina being his, then the DNA match is significant – indeed ... perhaps conclusive – evidence of his guilt," Austin wrote. Whether Yeakel will agree with that conclusion remains to be seen.
The state contends that Reed, while on foot, overcame 19-year-old Giddings resident Stites as she drove to Bastrop for an early morning shift at H-E-B, and that the semen found in Stites is the "Cinderella's slipper" proving its case. Reed's supporters contend that a far more likely suspect is Jimmy Fennell, a former Giddings and Georgetown cop to whom Stites was engaged at the time of her murder. Fennell is currently serving a 10-year sentence for kidnapping and sexual assaulting a woman while on duty and responding to a call for service as a Georgetown cop. Reed's case has been wending its way through state and federal courts on appeal since 1999, and, in the intervening years, a mass of evidence has come to light that paints Fennell as a man with a troubling history of violence toward women – a history that Reed's supporters say bolsters their contention that Fennell murdered Stites after discovering that she was having a sexual affair with Reed.
Moreover, Reed's supporters and his lead lawyer, Bryce Benjet, say that the reason the state's theory of the case convinced jurors of Reed's guilt is that questionable medical evidence, presented by the state to demonstrate that Stites had been raped just before her killing, was not scientifically sound and was never challenged by Reed's trial attorneys, an oversight that Reed has said made those attorneys ineffective. (In March, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a defendant should be allowed to argue ineffective assistance claims even if those issues were not raised at trial, so Benjet may next make that claim against former Reed appeal attorney Bill Barbisch for not arguing that Reed's trial attorneys were ineffective for failing to challenge the state's contention that Stites was raped.)
Smith also writes, "Rodney Reed: Another Innocent Man on Texas Death Row?" for the Nation.
At first glance, Texas’s capital case against Rodney Reed looks fairly persuasive.
Nineteen-year-old Stacey Stites was found dead in a wooded area just off a county road in Bastrop, Texas, in 1996. She was half-naked, with Reed’s DNA inside her. The DNA was the “Cinderella’s slipper,” special prosecutor Lisa Tanner told the jury at trial: it matched Reed’s; therefore, Reed was the murderer.
But what if it weren’t that simple?It has been fourteen years since Reed was convicted and sentenced to die for Stites’s murder. Since then, evidence has accumulated that calls into question the state’s case against him—evidence that includes ineffective lawyering, possible prosecutorial misconduct, junk science and racial bias. Perhaps most damning, it also includes a failure by police to fully investigate a man with a troubling history of violence against women: Jimmy Fennell, Stites’s fiancé, a former police officer who is currently serving prison time for kidnapping and sexual assault.
Reed, who is black, has maintained his innocence and said that the DNA can be explained because he was having a sexual affair with Stites, who was white. In small-town Texas such an illicit, interracial relationship remains an explosive revelation—one that Reed’s supporters say infuriated Fennell, who is white, giving him a strong motive to harm his young bride-to-be.
Earlier coverage of Rodney Reed's case begins at the link.
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