Texas | Death Row Defense Team Charges Prosecutors Illegally Hid Evidence from Rodney Reed's Jury, 23 Years Ago
The all-white jury convicted Rodney Reed, who is Black, of the murder of Stacy Stites, a white woman, in 1998 after police ignored Stites’ fiancé, a police officer named Jimmy Fennell, asserted Reed’s lawyers.
“Mr. Fennell, Ms. Stites’s fiancé, was the prime suspect, but police turned their attention to Mr. Reed when DNA recovered from Ms. Stites matched Mr. Reed, with whom Ms. Stites was having a relationship,” said defense lawyers Friday.
The defense stopped Reed’s scheduled execution of Nov. 20, 2019, when the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed his execution to allow the courts to consider new evidence of his innocence.
“At a two week evidentiary hearing in July, 2021, Mr. Reed demonstrated that he did not kidnap, sexually assault, or murder Ms. Stites and that no reasonable jury would now convict him. While a decision on that hearing is still pending before the CCA, this new writ shows that Mr. Reed’s conviction violates the most central tenets of our Constitution and cannot stand,” said lawyers.
They said “illegally concealed statements from Stacy Stites’s co-workers showing (that Mr. Reed and Ms. Stites knew each other and were romantically involved),” according to a Request for Grant of Application for Writ of Habeas Corpus filed at the 21st Judicial District Court in Bastrop County, Texas and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
The application also claims the “State illegally suppressed statements from Ms. Stites’s neighbors about loud domestic violence arguments between Ms. Stites and her fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, a police officer who was the prime suspect in Ms. Stites’s murder for nearly a year.
The Request for Grant of Application for Writ of Habeas Corpus is here: https://tinyurl.com/49r7e7mx
The pleading insists that under the U.S. Supreme Court case Brady vs. Maryland (1963), the “State had an affirmative duty to turn over all evidence that was favorable to Mr. Reed’s defense. Instead, the State hid the evidence pointing to Mr. Reed’s innocence for more than 2 decades.”
“The prosecution’s concealment of statements from Stacey Stites’s co-workers and neighbors is a textbook example of a Brady violation. The constitutional violation is as crystal clear as the remedy: Rodney Reed’s conviction and death sentence must be overturned,” said Jane Pucher, Senior Staff Attorney at the Innocence Project, and one of Mr. Reed’s attorneys.
The defense notes that during Reed’s trial, prosecutors repeatedly told Mr. Reed’s jury—falsely—that investigators “talked to all these people, and not one of them … ever said she was associated with that defendant. Ever. They weren’t dating according to anyone, they weren’t friends, they weren’t associates.”
The application states that the “withheld information is crucial because it demonstrates that the key factual theory of the State’s capital murder case against Mr. Reed – that he had to have kidnapped Ms. Stites because the two were strangers – was false.” (Application at p. 2.)
Defense lawyers report, “Less than a month before Mr. Reed’s July, 2021 evidentiary hearing on a separate petition still pending before the CCA, the State ‘discovered’ exculpatory evidence revealing that before trial at least three of Ms. Stites’s co-workers gave statements to law enforcement and the prosecution that Mr. Reed and Ms. Stites knew each other and were, in Ms. Stites’s own words, ‘good friends.’”
The pleading claims, “[H]ad the Court [of Criminal Appeals] not remanded Mr. Reed’s prior Brady, false testimony and actual innocence claims for a determination on the merits, this information would have remained hidden forever.”
The prosecution disclosed, for the first time to the defense, that “Suzan Hugen, a friend and co-worker of Ms. Stites, gave a statement to police that she saw Mr. Reed and Ms. Stites at the H.E.B. where the women worked and she introduced Mr. Reed to Ms. Hugen as a ‘good or close friend.’”
Hugen told police, added the defense, that Stites and Reed appeared “friendly, giggling, and flirting” and Hugen also told police that “she believed that Mr. Fennell was physically abusive toward Ms. Stites.”
The application also notes, “2 other H.E.B. co-workers of Ms. Stites also told police that Mr. Reed and Ms. Stites knew each other. These pre-trial interviews were not disclosed to Mr. Reed’s attorneys for 23 years, until the eve of the July, 2021 evidentiary hearing.”
A neighbor downstairs also “reported violent domestic arguments between Ms. Stites and Mr. Fennell to a police officer and a District Attorney in neighboring Lee County, Ted Weems. Although then-District Attorney Weems had an affirmative duty under Brady v. Maryland to turn this information over to Mr. Reed’s attorneys, he — like other police and prosecutors — did not do so,” said the defense.
The pleading also charges, “The State’s own experts conceded at the July, 2021 evidentiary hearing that the central points of the State’s forensic case were false,” and that the prosecution “sponsored false forensic testimony at Mr. Reed’s trial, which it used to argue that Mr. Reed’s defense, that he and Ms. Stites had consensual sex a few days prior to her death, was scientifically impossible.”
Source: The Davis Vanguard, Staff, December 18, 2021
New Rodney Reed case appeal: Attorneys say prosecution had evidence of Stites relationship
Reed has spent more than two decades behind bars, convicted of the 1996 rape and murder of Stacey Stites in Bastrop County.
Over a two-week evidentiary hearing this summer, his defense team brought new witnesses to the stand and argued his innocence before the 21st District Court in Bastrop. In November, presiding Judge J.D. Langley delivered his recommendation to let Reed’s conviction stand and deny any relief. He detailed his belief that many of the witnesses lacked credibility and that Reed’s defense team had not “proven by clear and convincing evidence that no reasonable juror would have convicted him of capital murder.”
His recommendation was to be sent to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which has the power to make the decision to overturn Reed’s conviction. The case is still pending before the high court.
According to court records filed Friday, Reed’s team has filed what’s called a “successor petition” for a writ of habeas corpus, in addition to the separate writ for habeas corpus filed before the evidentiary hearing. A writ of habeas corpus is a legal term for requesting that someone be brought before the court to determine if the person’s detention is lawful. Another “successor” petition can be filed if it indicates newly discovered evidence. Defense: Was newly discovered evidence withheld at Rodney Reeds 1998 trial?
Their new filing claims the prosecution team had “new material” that pointed to a relationship between Reed and Stites and that this evidence came to light “on the eve” of the summer’s evidentiary hearing. KXAN investigators originally reported on this claim in July.
Reed’s defense claims that before his original trial in 1998 the prosecution withheld statements indicating three of Stites’ colleagues knew of a relationship between Reed and the victim.
The information “could not have been more pivotal,” Reed’s defense argues in the filing.
The new information came in disclosures received by Reed’s defense attorney Andrew MacRae from the prosecution on June 25. The Bastrop hearing began July 19.
In one disclosure the prosecution said it had received a witness statement from a former H-E-B worker named Suzan Hugen. Hugen told prosecutors she had met Reed and Stites together at the store, Stites told her they were friends, and they were “flirting” during the encounter, according to a court exhibit.
Prosecutors provided a second disclosure, which, they said, contained witness statements prepared by the original prosecution team prior to the 1998 trial. The prosecutor that sent the disclosures to MacRae said he first discovered them just days prior to June 25.
The original prosecution’s summaries indicated an H-E-B employee named Ron Haas said he had heard rumors that Reed would visit Stites at the store. A second grocery store employee, Andrew Cardenas, said a third employee, Jose Coronado, said he saw Stites and Reed speaking and “got the impression” they were friends. However, Coronado denied that conversation ever took place.
“This withheld information is crucial because it demonstrates that the key factual theory of the State’s capital murder case against Mr. Reed – that he had to have kidnapped Ms. Stites because the 2 were strangers – was false,” according to Reed’s latest writ. “This information, moreover, directly supports Mr. Reed’s contention that is central to his defense at trial – and in the intervening decades – that he and Ms. Stites were, in fact, having a consensual sexual relationship.”
The new petition also makes the claim that prosecutors presented “false scientific testimony” during the summer hearing.
After Langley released his recommendation, Stites’ sister Debra Oliver told KXAN they were pleased with his decision.
“My family has been tortured and retraumatized by this nightmare for 25 years and it is time for justice to prevail,” she said. “In 25 years, no tangible evidence of a relationship between Stacey and the defendant has ever materialized. That is because no relationship ever existed.”
Prior to his decision, at closing arguments for the hearing, Oliver had called the proceedings an “atrocious violation” of the writ process.
Reed’s family has continued to support his innocence, and his brother Roderick told KXAN at the time, “If this time we can get a free and fair trial, Rodney Reed will free himself. The evidence will free Rodney Reed.”
Source: KXAN news, Staff, December 19, 2021
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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
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde