Judge rejects Texas death row inmate Rodney Reed’s bid for new trial
Texas loss of life row inmate Rodney Reed, a Black man who has lengthy insisted he’s harmless within the homicide 25 years in the past of a younger white grocery retailer clerk, doesn’t deserve a brand new trial, a decide beneficial Monday, placing his destiny again into the arms of the state’s highest legal courtroom.
The 50-page ruling by state District Decide J.D. Langley, following a two-week evidentiary listening to over the summer time, clears the best way for the Texas Courtroom of Felony Appeals to equally deny Reed’s bid for an additional trial, though it is not unparalleled for the courtroom to go towards a decide’s advice.
Langley wrote that Reed, 53, “has not confirmed by clear and convincing proof that no cheap juror would have convicted him of capital homicide.”
There isn’t any date for when the appeals courtroom will take up the case once more.
Jane Pucher, one in every of Reed’s attorneys, mentioned she believes a brand new jury deserves to listen to the “overwhelming proof of Rodney Reed’s innocence.”
“We hope the Courtroom of Felony Appeals acknowledges that he must be given a brand new trial,” Pucher, a senior employees lawyer on the Innocence Challenge, mentioned in a press release.
Reed’s case was championed by celebrities, together with actuality tv star Kim Kardashian West, media mogul Oprah Winfrey and the singer Rihanna, in addition to a bipartisan group of Texas lawmakers within the weeks main as much as his deliberate execution in November 2019.
With simply days earlier than he was set to die by deadly injection, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles beneficial that Gov. Greg Abbott grant Reed a reprieve as new witnesses and forensic proof that have been uncovered within the years since he was convicted of killing Stacey Stites, 19, forged doubt within the prosecution’s case. Individually, the Courtroom of Felony Appeals additionally stepped in, halting the execution and sending the case again to the trial courtroom for the newest claims to be reviewed.
Reed was discovered responsible by an all-white jury within the 1996 rape and homicide of Stites, a grocery retailer employee within the central Texas city of Bastrop, east of Austin.
In 1998, prosecutors on the trial laid out how Reed encountered Stites on the street as she drove to work. After she stopped for him, they mentioned, he raped and strangled her along with her personal belt. Stites was weeks away from getting married to a police officer named Jimmy Fennell.
Semen was discovered inside Stites, and police matched the DNA to that of Reed, who was arrested a yr later. Reed’s sperm had beforehand been collected as a part of an unrelated sexual assault investigation.
Reed initially denied to investigators that he knew Stites. However he later defined to them why they found his DNA: He mentioned he and Stites have been having a clandestine and consensual sexual relationship, one which was taboo as a result of he’s Black and Stites was white.
He mentioned they met at a recreation room the place they performed pool, and so they final had intercourse a few days earlier than her loss of life. Reed’s sperm was the one bodily proof that linked him to Stites on the crime scene.
Reed’s attorneys, in calling for a brand new trial, pointed to new witnesses who had come ahead and forensic proof that had been re-evaluated. That features individuals who had forged doubt on Reed’s conviction and, in some instances, implicated Fennell, the sufferer’s fiancé.
New witnesses included Arthur Snow Jr. who mentioned Fennell informed him throughout a jail yard dialog: “I needed to kill my (N-word)-loving fiancée.” Fennell had been imprisoned on the time for an unrelated kidnapping and sexual assault conviction, in line with The Related Press. New forensic proof from a number of scientists who took the stand urged Stites might have died throughout instances that Fennell testified he had been along with her.
On the evidentiary listening to, the state introduced on reminiscence skilled witnesses to problem a few of the witness accounts after greater than twenty years, and likewise medical specialists who mentioned the marks on Stites’ physique indicated she was sexually assaulted.
“The reality is, your honor, that Rodney Reed kidnapped, brutally raped and violently murdered Stacey Stites,” Assistant Lawyer Normal Travis Bragg mentioned within the prosecution’s closing arguments final month.
The state Lawyer Normal’s Workplace didn’t instantly return a request for remark Monday.
Reed and his household have maintained his innocence, and a cousin of Stites had mentioned he must be granted a brand new trial.
The Related Press contributed.