Death Penalty News

Stay of execution came just hours after parole board unanimously recommended 120-day reprieve The Texas death row prisoner Rodney Reed was granted a stay of execution on Friday, 5 days before he was scheduled to be put to death for a murder he insists he did not commit. The Texas court of criminal appeals blocked the execution indefinitely and sent the case back to the trial court in Bastrop county, where Reed was sentenced in 1998 for the murder of Stacey Stites two years earlier. The court had previously rejected multiple appeals, but Reed’s lawyers argued that fresh evidence bolstered his claim of innocence.  They said in a statement that they “are extremely relieved and thankful … this opportunity will allow for proper consideration of the powerful and mounting new evidence of Mr Reed’s innocence”. Millions of people, including a clutch of celebrities, have rallied behind Reed’s cause, helping to generate momentum and public attention as the execution dat...

Convicted murderer Rodney Reed is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Nov. 20, but Gov. Greg Abbott has the power to stop it. As it stands, there’s no indication that Abbott will. He has only stopped one execution since becoming governor 5 years ago. Reed was sentenced to death in 1998, after being convicted of the brutal 1996 rape and killing of a 19-year-old woman from central Texas, Stacey Stites. And though the governor has yet to weigh in on this specific case, he supports capital punishment, as do most voters in the state. According to a June 2018 poll from the University of Texas/Texas Tribune, fully three-fourths of Texans strongly or somewhat support the death penalty. But the question at hand has nothing to do with the death penalty, per se. Granting a reprieve would simply be the right thing to do — and a necessary precaution against the doubts that would linger, if Reed is executed as scheduled. Reed has consistently maintained his innocence, and legi...

El Paso convicted killer Justen Grant Hall was executed Wednesday evening for the strangulation murder of a woman in 2002. Hall, 38, had been on Texas' death row since 2005 when he was sentenced to die after being convicted of capital murder in the strangulation of 29-year-old Melanie Ruth Billhartz in 2002. The killing of Billhartz occurred while Hall was out on bond on another murder charge, the fatal shooting of a transgender woman that was labeled a hate crime. Hall was a member of the white supremacist Aryan Circle gang and investigators had said that prejudice was a motive in the hate crime killing. In October 2002, Hall strangled Billhartz to death with a black electrical cord and then buried her body in the New Mexico desert because he feared she would tell police about a methamphetamine cooking operation at a house in El Paso. Another man had assaulted Billhartz during an argument and Hall and other gang members feared the meth operation would be dis...

Less than a month before Rodney Reed is set to be executed in Texas, a former prison inmate claims someone else confessed to the murder that sent Reed to prison. Reed has spent more than 21 years on death row for the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites in Bastrop, Texas. Police say Reed assaulted, raped and strangled Stites, but he insists he's innocent. He is set to be executed on November 20. Former inmate Arthur Snow Jr. filed an affidavit in court earlier this week saying Stites' fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, confessed to the murder years ago. Snow had been serving a sentence for forgery at a DeWitt County, Texas, prison in 2010 when he made a deal with Fennell, who'd sought protection from other inmates, the document states. Snow was then a member of the Aryan Brotherhood gang, it states. In his affidavit, Snow said he was with Fennell in the prison yard when Fennell started bragging about killing Stites. "Jimmy said his fiancé had been sleeping around wi...