Rodney Reed: Will Texas execute another innocent man?

Rodney Reed

Rodney Reed was convicted of the 1996 rape and murder of Stacey Stites. At the time, Stites was engaged to Jimmy Fennell Jr., a police officer in the nearby town of Giddings. At the same time, she was having an affair with Reed. Both Stites and Fennell are white; Reed is Black. Rodney was tried by an all-white jury in a small Texas town.

The only evidence linking Reed to the crime was semen DNA. But no evidence of rape was found--and Reed admitted to having sexual relations with Stites days before.

Today, the medical examiner who testified for the prosecution in the original trial, Robert Bayardo, has said publicly that the state misconstrued his statements, using Reed's DNA to place him at the scene of the murder. But the state has refused to listen to their former witness.

Meanwhile, substantial evidence points to another killer: Jimmy Fennell Jr. Fennell is currently serving time after being convicted of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a woman he detained while on duty in Georgetown, Texas. The evidence linking Fennell, not Reed, to the murder is troubling:

-- At new hearings for Reed in 2006, a witness testified to seeing Stites and Fennell together in the early morning hours of the day of her murder.

-- Another witness testified that Fennell once said he would strangle his girlfriend with a belt if he found her cheating on him--the exact manner in which Stites was killed.

-- Fennell was an original suspect and failed multiple lie detector tests when asked if he had strangled Stites.

-- DNA found at the crime scene was linked to 2 police officers who Fennell worked with. Prosecutors failed to give this evidence to the defense during the original trial.

-- The original investigation found no fingerprints of Reed's in the truck that investigators say was used to dump Stites' body, only those fingerprints of Stites and Fennell.

-- Before the defense could have access to the truck or request further testing of any of this forensic evidence, police returned the truck to Fennell. He sold it the very next day.

Since the time of Reed's last evidentiary hearing, still more new facts have come to light, including the affidavit about the forensic evidence provided by the former medical examiner. Yet this crucial evidence has been dismissed by the state courts, most recently by the federal 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, despite the fact that a life hangs on the line.

Because of the troubling evidence that he was framed and railroaded, Rodney Reed's case has been the subject of national media attention, attracting articles in The Nation and elsewhere. More than 12,000 people have signed an online petition supporting him, and he is the subject of a documentary State vs. Reed: A Question of Justice on Texas' Death Row (you can watch it on YouTube). The Intercept website recently published an-depth investigation titled "Is Texas Getting Ready to Kill an Innocent Man?"

The backdrop to this case is the epidemic of wrongful convictions in Texas. (...)

With all the evidence pointing to a police officer as the real murderer, Reed's case paints a particularly troubling picture about a rigged system. Will Texas execute another innocent man?

Source: SocialistWorker.org, November 24, 2014

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