Death Penalty News

Law is, as legal scholars and commentators have long recognized , both a refuge for those seeking to escape abuses of power and a trap in which their claims of justice get lost in a maze of statutory intricacies. Nowhere has this been more clearly on display than in the world of capital punishment. Over the span of half a century, the Supreme Court has gone from championing the rights of capital defendants and death row inmates to deflecting and denying their pursuit of justice. Where once the court carefully scrutinized procedures used in death cases, insisting that they had to conform to the dictates of so-called super due process , today it has made the due process accorded in those cases not super at all .

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from longtime Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed who has sought to test crime-scene evidence that he says will help clear him. The justices left in place a ruling against Reed from the federal appeals court in New Orleans for the second time in less than three years. The three liberal justices dissented. Reed was sentenced to death for the 1996 killing of 19-year-old Stacey Stites. Prosecutors have refused to allow for DNA testing of the webbed belt that was used to strangle Stites as she made her way to work at a supermarket in Bastrop, a rural community about 30 miles (50 kilometers) southeast of Austin.

Reed, a Black man on death row for more than 25 years, has gained international support for his claims that he did not kill 19-year-old Stacey Stites, a white woman. Another appeal over DNA testing of evidence is still pending. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied Rodney Reed a chance for a new trial Wednesday, nearly four years after halting his execution and ordering the trial court to weigh whether Reed might be innocent in the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites. In a 129-page ruling , Texas’ highest criminal court delivered a crushing blow to Reed, who has been on Texas’ death row for more than a quarter-century. The 55-year-old’s case gained international attention as his execution neared in 2019, with a new swell of supporters doubting his guilt in 19-year-old Stites’ murder and calling for his life to be spared.

WASHINGTON (CBSNewsTexas.com/AP) - The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that longtime Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed should have a chance to argue for testing of crime-scene evidence that he says will help clear him.   The justices, in a 6-3 decision, sent Reed's case back to a lower court for his constitutional challenge to the state's law on DNA testing. The issue before the high court was whether Reed, sentenced to death nearly 25 years ago, waited too long to file his lawsuit claiming that untested crime-scene evidence would exonerate him.  Texas courts and the federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled that he missed the deadline. But the Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, reversed the appellate ruling. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented. "If there is a mitigating factor to today's decision," Thomas wrote, it's that the outcome "is no barrier to the prompt execution of Reed's lawful sentenc...

Saying that recent events in Texas’ attempt to execute death-row prisoner Melissa Lucio had shaken his faith in the criminal legal system, an influential Republican state legislator has said that he would now support a moratorium on executions in the state. In an April 29, 2022 interview on WFAA-TV’s Inside Texas Politics with Jason Whitely, Representative Jeff Leach, co-chair of the Texas House of Representatives’ bi-partisan Criminal Justice Reform Caucus, said “every option [for death-penalty reform] will be on the table, every tool in the toolbox,” including potentially a moratorium on executions. Leach, who was one of the founding members of the reform caucus, was the driving force behind a bipartisan legislative effort that resulted in majorities of both the Texas House and Senate signing letters calling for the commutation Lucio’s sentence. On April 25, 2022, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals halted Lucio’s scheduled April 27th execution and directed a Cameron County trial cou...

In a case legal experts say could redress a miscarriage of justice or institutionalize it, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review the Texas federal courts’ refusal to permit DNA testing of crime-scene evidence that could potentially exonerate death-row prisoner Rodney Reed. On April 25, 2022, the Court granted Reed’s petition for writ of certiorari, which raises the question of when the time clock begins to run on a state prisoner’s federal civil rights lawsuit seeking access to DNA testing. Though the issue involves technical procedural issues, the way it is resolved will determine whether Reed and others seeking to prove their innocence have meaningful access to the federal courts to obtain DNA testing. Reed has maintained his innocence of the 1996 murder of 19-year-old Stacey Stites, with whom he says he had been having an affair that they kept secret because of local bigotry towards interracial relationships. Reed is Black and Stites was White. Reed’s lawyers argue that DNA te...

Rodney Reed was sentenced to death for the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites in Bastrop. Reed has long professed his innocence in the 1996 murder for which he faces execution. Key evidence in the case has not been tested for DNA, including the ligature used to strangle 19-year-old Stacey Stites. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to answer a legal question that could open the door for DNA testing of evidence used to convict Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed. Reed was sentenced to death more than 23 years ago for the murder of 19-year-old Stacey Stites in Bastrop County. Reed has maintained his innocence since the 1996 killing. His lawyers have brought forward evidence over the years that they say implicates Stites' fiance, Jimmy Fennell. Crime scene evidence — including the belt used to strangle Stites and her clothing — was not tested for DNA, and Reed has unsuccessfully sought testing to help establish his innocence. Prosecutors have fought the efforts, arguing that state mishandling ...

With Melissa Lucio’s execution put on indefinite hold by a Texas appeals court, her attorneys will now be focused on trying to convince a judge to recommend she get a new trial. But that’s expected to be a tough courtroom battle and even if they manage to get the trial judge on their side, the state’s top criminal court — which has the final say — might disagree and keep her conviction in place, legal experts said Tuesday. “Winning a favorable recommendation is not a done deal. ...There is still a long way to go before this case is resolved,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Lucio had been set for lethal injection on Wednesday for the 2007 death of her daughter Mariah in the South Texas city of Harlingen. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals delayed her execution on Monday. If ultimately put to death, Lucio would be the first Latina executed by Texas since 1863, and the first woman the state has put to death since 2014. Prosecutors have...

An appeal filed here Friday in the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals charged the prosecution in a trial more than 20 years ago “illegally concealed statements” that led to a man’s conviction and death sentence, and “suppressed statements” that benefitted a police officer, who was a prime suspect. 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 demonstrat...

Virginia’s historic abolition of the death penalty highlighted a year in which support for capital punishment continued to erode, according to the 2021 Year End Report from the Death Penalty Information Center. Executions, death sentences, and public support for capital punishment were all at or near historic lows in 2021, the report said, while the executions and new death sentences that did take place exposed deep flaws in the administration of the nation’s capital punishment system. Virginia, which had carried out more executions since colonial times than any other state in the country, became the first Southern state to end the practice. Abolition efforts explicitly linked the death penalty to the state’s history of slavery, lynchings, and Jim Crow segregation. The repeal made Virginia the 23rd state to legislatively or judicially abolish the death penalty, and the 11th to do so this century. Twenty-six states now have abolished the death penalty or imposed gubernatorial moratoria...

Doubts over Reed’s guilt in the 1996 murder of Stacey Stites have lingered for more than 20 years and gained international attention. But a judge decided against recommending a new trial. BASTROP — More than two decades after Rodney Reed was sentenced to death for the murder of 19-year-old Stacey Stites, doubts about his guilt and the role race might have played in his 1998 conviction continue to haunt this Central Texas town. On Monday, a judge appointed to reexamine the case slammed the door on Reed’s best chance to avoid execution, releasing his findings that newly presented evidence is not enough to grant Reed a new trial. The ruling by retired state District Judge J.D. Langley is a dramatic setback for efforts to win Reed’s freedom in a case that has spawned international attention and outrage, often cited by Reed’s supporters as an example of a Black man railroaded by an American criminal justice system. Langley’s recommendation , issued two weeks after he heard attorneys’ final ...

The Rodney Reed hearing ended Thursday with prosecutors presenting witnesses in an effort to prove Reed had a history of violence toward women, including one who said he raped her in 1995. A defense attorney said the judge should not consider the rape testimony or the testimony of another woman who testified Thursday that Reed assaulted her in 1996, because Reed had not faced trial in either charge. Reed was convicted of capital murder in Stacey Stites' strangulation death in 1998 and received the death penalty. Stites' body was found by the side of a rural road in Bastrop County on April 23, 1996, with Reed's sperm in her. Before she died, Stites had planned to marry her fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, then a Giddings police officer. 5 days before Reed's scheduled execution in 2019, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered that a hearing be held in state District Court in Bastrop after defense attorneys presented new evidence they said exonerated Reed. The hearing started Ju...