The State of Texas is scheduled to execute Rodney Reed on Nov. 20 for the 1996 murder of 19-year-old Stacey Stites in Bastrop. The only direct evidence of Reed’s guilt was his semen taken from the victim’s body. Reed, however, who is black, has insisted from the outset that he had been having a secret consensual sexual relationship with Stites, who was white. Witnesses, including the victim’s sister, have now come forward to corroborate that romantic relationship. Moreover, according to the Innocence Project, 3 forensic experts who testified at Reed’s trial have signed affidavits asserting that the original time of death is inaccurate. That, in turn, throws into serious doubt the timeline for Reed to have been the killer.
On Nov. 7, Florida is scheduled to execute James Dailey for the murder of 14-year-old Shelly Boggio near St. Petersburg in 1985. Dailey, an Air Force veteran who served three tours in Vietnam, was implicated by his co-defendant, Jack Pearcy, who is currently serving a life sentence. But according to Seth Miller, Director of the Innocence Project of Florida, Pearcy, who has a history of violence against women, subsequently said 4 separate times that he, alone, committed the murder and that Dailey is innocent.
“This case has red flags of innocence,” Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told the Tampa Bay Times. A total of 29 Florida inmates on death row have been exonerated, the highest number in the nation.
Historical context
A strong moral argument can certainly be made against capital punishment. From a legal perspective, however, it is an historically valid, appropriate response to instances where a person willfully and with premeditation takes the life of another human being. To allow a cold-blooded murderer to live when his victim lives no more is a manifestly unjust result for a legal system whose business is justice. It would also be an implicit concession that the life of the victim wasn’t really all that valuable after all.
Deeply rooted in English common law, the death penalty was employed in the American colonies for a variety of crimes, some relatively minor by today’s standards. The adoption of the Eighth Amendment in 1791, with its prohibition against the infliction of “cruel and unusual punishments”, didn’t change this, although executions came to take place most often in cases of murder and other especially serious felonies. It is against these realities that today’s constitutional challenges to the death penalty must be evaluated and rejected.
At the same time, the execution of an innocent person is not merely an unspeakable injustice but the ultimate failing of fallible minds. And yet it is virtually certain that innocent people have, indeed, been executed in this country, and not in insignificant numbers.
DNA exonerations
In support of this disconcerting proposition, consider that, according to statistics compiled by the Innocence project, 130 people convicted of murder were subsequently exonerated by DNA testing as of July 9, 2018. In 31 percent of those cases, the wrongful convictions had been procured through witness misidentification, and in 62 percent by false confessions. The lesson to be taken from this is crystal clear. No person should ever be executed where there is any doubt whatsoever about his or her guilt. Theoretically, the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard of proof required to obtain any criminal conviction should be a guarantor against this. Obviously it isn’t. Either juries don’t understand it, or they don’t faithfully apply it.
Erroneous verdicts are often upheld on appeal because of the well-established practice of appellate courts to give great deference to the factual findings of juries. The theory behind this is that jurors, having had the opportunity to observe the witnesses at trial, are in the best position to evaluate their credibility. But in a capital case, where a defendant’s life is at stake, appellate courts should be given the power to set aside a death sentence where there is a scintilla of doubt about the defendant’s guilt. At the very least, Rodney Reed and James Dailey fall into this category.
Carrying out their executions will provide death penalty opponents with yet more ammunition in their fight to have capital punishment finally and permanently outlawed in the United States. If the criminal justice system won’t raise the bar to insure that such monstrous miscarriages of justice never ever happen, then maybe it is, indeed, time to stop executing anybody at all.
Source: Staten Island Advance, Commentary, October 17, 201ç. Daniel Leddy’s column “On the Law” appears weekly.
Did Rodney Reed get a fair trial? Dr. Phil says ‘hell no’
Rodney Reed and the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites took to the national stage last week in a two-episode feature on the “Dr. Phil” talk show.
The episodes featured interviews of Reed’s defense attorneys, a friend and family member of Stites, forensic experts and a behind-the-glass interview with Reed from within the Polunsky Unit, where Texas houses its male death row inmates in Livingston. After Phil McGraw and his producers’ analysis of the case — in which Reed and his supporters have claimed his innocence for decades — McGraw sided in favor of the man who has sat on death row since his 1998 conviction in Bastrop County.
“I don’t think it’s a question of whether he’s guilty or not guilty. I think the question is whether he had a full trial, with a full airing of all the evidence,” McGraw said during the episode’s closing comments. “I think the answer to that question, in my opinion, is not just no, but hell no.”
McGraw’s in-studio audience agreed with his assessment. In a straw poll conducted among audience members near the end of the 2-part episode — which dug into the possible culpability of Stites’ former fiancé Jimmy Fennell as the possible killer — 99% thought Reed was not guilty.
“Thankfully there are courts for this,” said Fennell’s attorney Bob Phillips, who represented Fennell during his 2007 conviction for the kidnapping and sexual assault of a woman in his custody while he worked as a Georgetown police officer.
Phillips was the only person interviewed during the segment that supported Reed’s conviction. Stites’ sisters, who also support Reed’s conviction, declined to appear on the show and instead issued a statement that said “an elaborate story has been created trying to blame my sister’s murder on her fiancé.”
The show’s producers did not reach out to Bastrop County District Attorney Bryan Goertz nor did they directly contact the Texas attorney general’s office, although a spokesperson with the show said the AG’s office was informed of the segment by Stites’ sisters. The governor’s office was also contacted 3 times, but producers never received a response.
“I think it’s very telling about the theme of the episode when no one reached out to the state for their input,” Goertz said.
“Dr. Phil weighing in on a criminal justice matter is of no significance to the criminal justice system and only tarnishes (Dr. Phil’s) credibility as a doctor,” Goertz added.
The episodes touched on every chapter of the Reed case, from the rape and sexual assault accusations Reed faced prior to Stites’ death — none of which resulted in a conviction — to the two witnesses Reed’s attorneys brought forward this month in a last-minute attempt to halt his execution.
In July, a state judge ordered Reed to be executed Nov. 20.
The show interviews also included Kevin Gannon, a retired detective with the New York Police Department, forensic victimologist Lee Gilberston and Cyril Wecht, a forensic pathologist and medical examiner. All of them pushed forward a theory that Gannon has long elevated — that it is scientifically impossible to conclude that Reed could have raped and killed Stites at the time the state prosecutors argued he did. Reed became a suspect after investigators discovered 3 of this degraded sperm cells in Stites’ body. The degraded condition of the sperm cells would indicate that Reed had sex with Stites days before her body was found, which would support Reed’s claim that he and Stites were involved in a consensual relationship, Gannon said.
Instead, Gannon and the other experts point to Fennell as the killer. In the episode, they theorize that it was Fennell who grabbed Stites from behind with a belt around her neck, then held her head in a bathtub full of water.
“As far as I’m concerned, it was a drowning,” Gannon said. He also argues that it was Fennell, who was a Giddings police officer when Stites was killed, who dumped Stites’ body where investigators found it.
Phillips pushed back on that claim and said Stites’ mother lived next door to her daughter’s and Fennell’s apartment and heard Stites leave the apartment in the early morning hours on her way to work the day she was killed. If Fennell killed Stites and then took her body to the car to dump her, she would have heard the disturbance and Fennell’s return, Phillips said. Instead, Stites’ mother, like her sisters, firmly believes Reed is the killer. Phillips called Gannon and Reed’s defense attorneys theory “ludicrous.”
“No judge, no court has given credence to any of this,” he said.
It’s unclear how the episodes’ may affect Reed’s appeals to halt his execution, which have been filed in state district court and at the U.S. Supreme Court. Reed’s attorney, Bryce Benjet of the Innocence Project, said the show’s interest in the case and McGraw’s conclusion demonstrates that any outside scrutiny of this case reveals an alarming level of injustice.
“When neutral, middle-of-the-road people look at this case, it does not hold water,” Benjet said. “I think this (show) is a reflection that proceeding towards an execution in this case is not consistent with ordinary values and common sense.”
Source: Austin American-Statesman, Staff, October 17, 2019
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
