Two years ago, Rodney Reed’s impending execution sparked international outrage, prompting widespread calls for reprieve from people ranging from Beyoncé to Ted Cruz. In November 2019, a last-minute court ruling halted Reed’s execution five days before he was scheduled to die. This week, however, a judge dismissed his claims of innocence and rejected his request for a new trial, setting up yet another high profile showdown over Texas’ death penalty.
As Reed’s case continues to wind through the court system, it underlines troubling questions about Texas’ continued use of the death penalty, even as most of the country has turned away from executions. Reed’s attorneys and supporters have pointed to a flood of new evidence that has emerged since he was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1996 rape and murder of 19-year-old Stacey Stites in Bastrop. Over the past two decades, reporters, forensic experts, independent investigators, and lawyers have largely undermined the state’s case against Reed while pointing the finger at Stites’ fiancé, Jimmy Fennell, a former police officer who was convicted of kidnapping and raping a woman while on duty years after Stites was killed. This summer, Reed’s attorneys brought more than a dozen new witnesses in a two-week evidentiary hearing before state district judge J.D. Langley. In a 50-page ruling issued Monday, Langley sided with the state, calling Fennell’s testimony in the case credible and saying the courts have repeatedly considered Reed’s claims of innocence “and found them wanting.”
Reed’s supporters insist that his case underscores larger problems of racial bias in the death penalty. Reed, who is Black, and Stites, who was white, were having an affair around the time of her death, according to Reed and others who testified at his evidentiary hearing. People who knew Fennell have testified and filed affidavits in court alleging that he was violent, controlling, and had threatened to hurt Stites, while also accusing him of using racial slurs and being “extremely prejudiced” against Black people. Reed’s family has called his conviction and death sentence by an all-white jury the result of a “Jim Crow trial.” Some in the media have tied the case to the legacy of racial terror lynchings in the south.
